
Class. T.HiLt.'ii) 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 
EDITED BT JOHN MORLET 

ROSSETTI 



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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 



RO S S ET T I 



BY 



ARTHUR C. BENSON 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1904 

Aii rights reserved 



LlEC^AKY uf CONGRESS 
Two Copies RecBived 

MAR 28 1904 

Copyright Entry 



COfY S 



No. 






COPTEIGHT, 1904, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up, electrotyped, and published March, 1904. 



UTorbJooli ?3«28 

J. S. Gushing & Co. — Herwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

I DESIRE to make grateful acknowledgment to the 
following for the ready assistance that they have 
afforded me in a delicate and difficult task. To Mr. 
W. M. Eossetti first, for his cordial encouragement, 
as well as his readiness to give information, and for 
kind permission to make use of his writings on the 
subject, and detailed assistance with regard to mss. 
and pictures; to Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton for his 
unfailing kindness, vivid reminiscences, and generous 
sympathy ; to Mr. C. Fairfax Murray, who has given 
me abundance of information on many points, and has 
shown a willingness to answer questions and to criticise 
detailed statements for which I cannot be sufficiently 
grateful. He also allowed me to make use of his 
unique collections, and placed at my disposal the large 
number of Rossetti mss. which he possesses; to Mr. 
Hall Caine for his expressed interest, and permission 
to make use of his memorable Recollections; to Mr. 
Edmund Gosse for patient and invaluable criticism; 
to Mr. M. H. Spielmann for courteous help and fruit- 
ful suggestions ; to Mr. Lionel Gust for his willingness 



vi KOSSETTI 

to be consulted and his excellent advice; to Dr. 

Richard Garnett for sound and judicious criticism on 

Rossetti as a translator; to Mr. J. R. Clayton for 

interesting information; to Messrs. Ellis and Elvey 

for permission to quote from the Collected Works and 

other copyright volumes dealing with the subject; 

to my sister Miss Margaret Benson; to the Hon. 

Maurice Baring; to Mr. Percy Lubbock for careful 

and perspicacious criticism; and to Miss Beatrice 

Layman, for simply invaluable aid in verification and 

correction. 

A. C. B. 



AUTHORITIES 

The principal books I have consulted, and to which reference 
is made in the following pages, besides Rossetti's own publi- 
cations, are the following : — 

The Collected Works of D. G. Bossetti, 2 vols., 1901; 
D. G. Bossetti as Designer and Writer, 1889; Dante Gabriel 
Bossetti, Letters and Memoir, 2 vols., 1895 ; Buskin, Rossetti, 
Pre-Baphaelitism (1854-1862), 1899; Fre-Baphaelite Diaries 
and Letters (1835-1856), 1900; Bossetti Papers (1862-1870), 
1903 ; the above all edited or written by Mr. W. M. Bossetti. 

Letters of D. G. Bossetti to William Allingham (1854- 
1870), edited by G. Birkbeck Hill, 1897 ; Becollections of D. G. 
Bossetti, by T. Hall Caine, 1882 ; Dante Gabriel Bossetti, by 
William Sharp, 1882 ; Life of D. G. Bossetti, by Joseph 
Knight, 1887 ; Dante Bossetti and the Fre-Baphaelite Move- 
ment, by Esther Wood, 1894 ; Dante Gabriel Bossetti, with 
illustrations, by H. C. Marillier, 1901. 

Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott, 1892 ; Ford 
Madox Brown, by F. M. Hueffer, 1896 ; The Life of William 
Morris, by J. W. Mackail, 1899. 

Essays — Modern, by F. W. H. Myers, 1883 ; Essays and 
Studies, by A. C. Swinburne, 1875 ; Ward^s English Poets, 
Introduction to Rossetti's poems, by Walter Pater, 1883 ; 
Dictionary of National Biography, article on D. G. Bossetti, 



viii ROSSETTI 

by B. Ganiett, 1897 ; but the list is by no means exhaustive, 
as there are many contributions to periodical literature such 
as The Fre-Baphaelite Brotherhood, by W. Holman Hunt, in 
the Contemporary Beview, vol. xlix., 1886; and The Truth 
about Bossetti, by Theodore Watts (Watts-Dunton) in the 
Nineteenth Century, March 1883, vfhich contain interesting 
criticism and information not otherwhere given. 

A. C. B. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGK 

Early Years 1 

CHAPTER II 
The Pre-Raphaelites ....... 18 

CHAPTER III 
Later Life ......... 44 

CHAPTER IV 
PoEJis — Characteristics 78 

CHAPTER V 
Poems — "House of Life" 101 

CHAPTER VI 
Translations — Prose — Letters 145 

CHAPTER VII 
Painting 176 

CHAPTER VIII 
Character 202 

Index 231 

ix 



ROSSETTI 

CHAPTER I 

EARLY TEARS 

RossETTi's life, it has been well said, has been treated 
by his biographers too much in the Pre-Raphaelite 
method: we have been presented with a great mass 
of detail, highly interesting in itself, but tending 
somewhat to obscure the distinctness of the central 
figure. Yet it is hard to see how it could have been 
otherwise. The seclusion in which in later life Rossetti 
lived, the fascinated interest which he inspired in 
those who were admitted within the close-shut doors, 
the strange light, so to speak, which the initiated 
brought away glimmering round their brows, from visits 
to the inmost presence-chamber, the pictures, guarded 
so jealously from all public displays, the poems, spring- 
ing from a source of which the secret was so deeply 
hidden — all these things stimulated public curiosity 
to an extravagant degree. The result was that a host 
of distorted legends sprang up round the name of 
Rossetti, exaggerating all that was morbid, darkening 
every shadow, dwelling mainly on lapses from con- 
ventional standards, and substituting for the brave, 
genial, robust personality, which the chosen friends 

B 1 



2 ROSSETTI [chap. 

still discerned under the overshadowing of doom, 
an affected, decadent, fantastic figure, posturing in a 
gloomy clause macabre, or wandering in an airless laby- 
rinth of poisonous loveliness. 

It was necessary then, at all hazards, for his 
biographers to tell the truth about Kossetti. But the 
outcome is that we have been told almost too much of 
him, and yet not enough. Of the earlier and brighter 
years the record is comparatively slight. Yet we 
can follow his footsteps, print by print, along the 
darkening pilgrimage, while the sombre figure of the 
dreamer marches heavily along, with sometimes a 
word and sometimes a glance flashed upon us, but 
severe, inscrutable, sad with a wilful sadness. With 
what philosophy he faced the doom that threatened him, 
how his eager pursuit of the beautiful harmonised, if 
it did harmonise, with the stubborn insistence of pain 
and decay, whether he increased in a grim and stoical 
resistance, or turned his back upon the awful mystery, 
beguiling the time that still remained to be told ; or 
whether the whole character broadened and deepened 
under the pressure of the elemental sadness — all this 
we can never know. And here, I think, lies the deepest 
tragedy of Kossetti's life. A man of infinite self-will, of 
intense though limited outlook, sets out upon a certain 
pilgrimage, with a radiant goal in view, resolutely dis- 
regarding all that does not at once accommodate itself 
to his aims and faiths ; and then the vision changes, 
and he is confronted in the saddest and sternest way 
with the darkest problems that try and torture the 
mortal nature. The very gloom of the tragedy lends 
a deeper augustness to the great figure that slowly 
moves to meet it. But we may dare to hope that a 



1.] EARLY YEARS 3 

soul which, though knit with a temperament open in a 
singular degree to all the nearer seductions of beauty, 
kept its gaze resolutely on the ultimate hope, the 
further issue, the central vision, and which looked so 
earnestly through the symbol to the force symbolised, 
must attain in some freer region to the knowledge of 
the secret, that murmured like a phantom music, in 
divine, mysterious tones round the clouded earthly 
tabernacle. 

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, commonly known 
as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was born on May 12, 
1828, at No. 38 Charlotte Street, Portland Place. He 
was baptized at All Souls Church, Langham Place, 
according to the rites of the Church of England, his 
mother being a devoted Anglican, of an Evangelical 
type in early days, but later holding High Church 
views. The name Gabriel was his father's name. 
Charles came from his godfather, Mr. Charles Lyell 
of Kinnordy, a family friend, a keen student of Italian 
literature, and father of the celebrated geologist. Sir 
Charles Lyell. He was called Dante after his father's 
favourite poet. Rossetti dropped the name Charles in 
early life ; and it is strange that one who never even 
visited the land of his ancestors, who, as his brother 
says, " was always ready to reckon to the discredit of 
foreigners a certain shallow and frothy demonstrative- 
ness," who loved the free country of his nativity so 
well, should have parted with his only English in- 
heritance. He transposed his other names, probably 
to avoid being confused with his father, and we find 
him in early manhood writing to his aunt, who 
addressed him by his legal initials, to ask her to 



4 ROSSETTI [chap. 

use the nomenclature that he had permanently 
adopted. 

Of his four grandparents, three were pure Italians, 
one English. His father was Gabriele Rossetti (p. 1783), 
the youngest son of Nicola Rossetti, a blacksmith of 
Vasto, a town on the Adriatic coast of South Italy. 
They were simple people : Rossetti's grandmother 
could neither read nor write. 

His mother was Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, 
daughter of Gaetano Polidori and his wife Anna Maria 
(Pierce). Gaetano Polidori was the son of a physician 
of Bientina, a Tuscan town. He was at one time secre- 
tary to Alfieri, and settling in England in 1789, married 
Miss Pierce, a governess, and taught Italian. 

Gabriele Rossetti was a man of active mind, with 
strong literary tastes, in early days a skilful draughts- 
man, and always a beautiful reader and reciter. He 
was an improvisatore, a poet, and in early life librettist 
to the operatic theatre of San Carlo at Naples, being 
afterwards a Curator in the Museum of Naples. He 
was in high favour with Murat, King of Naples, and 
held a secretaryship in the department of public 
instruction. When the Bourbon king, Ferdinand I., 
was restored to his kingdom in 1815, Rossetti became 
a revolutionary, and was proscribed in 1821 when 
Ferdinand, with the aid of the Austrians, suppressed 
constitutional government. He escaped to Malta 
in 1821, in a British uniform, on a man-of-war. 
Eventually, in 1824, he settled in England and married 
in 1826. He was appointed Professor of Italian in 
King's College, London, in 1831. His health declined 
in 1842, and after some years of invalid life he died 
in 1854, " glad to be released." 



I.] EARLY YEARS 5 

The elder Kossetti was a sensitive, lively, active- 
minded man, sociable, good-humoured, and affectionate. 
He was a fervent patriot, and had a high standard of 
virtue. In religion he was a free-thinker, but with a 
strongly spiritual nature. He wrote voluminously, pa- 
triotic and religious poems, political treatises, mystical 
commentaries. His memory was greatly revered in 
Italy, and is commemorated by an inscription in the 
cloister of Santa Croce in Florence. The centenary of 
his birth was celebrated at Vasto in 1883, and the 
central piazza of the town renamed after him. 

There is a delightful picture of him by his son 
drawn in 1853, which represents him sitting at a table, 
in a cap and overcoat, closely scanning a manuscript 
which throws an upward light on the brow. His 
white hair grows thickly; the long, thin nose, the 
compressed lips, the tired but penetrating eyes, all 
show the man of high enthusiasm, intense intellectu- 
ality, and refined character. It is not fanciful to 
see a certain strain of asceticism and unworldliness 
in the face, combined with the gentle submission 
that comes of a faith in ideas and principles lying 
behind the material world. 

There was, it seems, a " certain tinge of self-opinion 
or self-applause in his temperament " ; he liked, said 
his son Dante, " to ride the high horse." But he was 
quite without personal vanity, full of kindness, and 
generously appreciative of the merits of others. 

Rossetti's mother was a cultivated woman, fond of 
reading, characterised by great simplicity of nature ; 
self-controlled, just, kind, abhorring gossip, strongly 
religious, and entirely devoted to her husband and 
children. She said once, in 1872, "I always had a 



6 ROSSETTI [chap. 

passion for intellect, and my wish was that my 
husband should be distinguished for intellect, and 
my children too. I have had my wish; and I now 
wish that there was a little less intellect in the family, 
so as to allow for a little more common-sense." She 
had herself no lack of the latter quality. They lived 
simply enough, and for ten years, when Gabriele 
Rossetti was disabled by illness, she took pupils, and 
worked hard for the support of the household. She 
was, too, an excellent woman of business, and they 
always lived within their means. 

Eossetti's brothers and sisters were three in number : 
Maria Francesca (1827-1876), who became a member 
of an Anglican sisterhood ; William Michael (6. 1829), 
who still survives, his brother's careful and accom- 
plished biographer; and Christina (1830-1894), the 
illustrious poetess. They were thus a family of 
marked characteristics, with strong literary and artis- 
tic gifts, with which was combined, in the sisters, 
a deep and mystical religion. The early years of 
the children were passed almost wholly in London. 
The household had few English acquaintances, but 
Mr. W. M. Eossetti says that " it seems hardly an 
exaggeration to say that every Italian staying in or 
passing through London, of a Liberal mode of political 
opinion, sought out my father, to make or renew 
acquaintance with him." There was also a perpetual 
flow of foreigners requiring assistance, and if a Masonic 
signal was given, as was often the case, Gabriele 
Eossetti being a Freemason, they were immediately 
relieved. Italian patriots, artists, literary men, musi- 
cians, venders of plaster-casts, dancing-masters, eclec- 
tics of every kind congregated there, among whom the 



I.] EARLY YEARS 7 

most famous were Paganini the violinist, Mazzini, and 
Panizzi. 

The children spoke Italian in the house, and listened 
to perpetual declamatory political talk, idealistic aspira- 
tions, recitations of poetry, and reminiscences of Italy. 

It is interesting to note that this seems to have 
developed in D. G. Rossetti an extreme hatred of 
politics. It is often to be remarked, in men of strong 
individuality, that the influences of early life seem 
to have had a curiously antagonistic effect upon their 
tastes and character ; and the result of this animated 
political society seems to have confirmed the young 
poet in a deeply rooted dislike of the lesser or practical 
politics. " He heard so much," it is said, " in his 
youth, of gli Austriaci (the Austrians) and Luigi Filippo 
(Louis Philippe), that he seems to have registered a 
vow to leave Luigi Filippo and the other potentates 
of Europe and their ministers to take care of them- 
selves." For political ideals and principles he seems 
to have had a faint sympathy, but for practical politics 
he had what can only be called an aversion, almost 
amounting to detestation. 

A similar influence can be detected in the boy's 
literary tastes. Gabriele Eossetti was an ardent 
student of Dante, and fond of abstruse mystical 
speculations on the subject of the poems. He would 
sit surrounded with huge folios in ancient type, 
" about alchemy, freemasonry, Brahminism, Sweden- 
borg, the Cabbala, etc., and filling page after page of 
prose, in impeccable handwriting full of underscorings, 
interlineations, and cancellings." Nothing that Dante 
wrote was allowed to be capable of simple and natural 
interpretation ; every passage and every word was an 



8 ROSSETTI [chap. 

elaborate vehicle for the concealment of some mystical 
speculation or political idea, and the highest praise for 
a book, in Gabriele Kossetti's mouth, was that it was 
a " libro sommamente mistico." 

The result on the children was that though they 
viewed their father's studies with respect, the books 
which he loved were understood not to " do to read." 
But Rossetti re-discovered Dante for himself when 
he was fifteen or sixteen ; and then, relieved of 
the fear of being obliged to interpret the poems in 
some remote sense, he mastered them with burning 
avidity. He wrote in the Preface to Early Italian 
Poets, "In those early days, all around me partook 
of the influence of the great Florentine ; till, from 
viewing it as a natural element, I also, growing older, 
was drawn within the circle." But, speaking gener- 
ally, the studies of their father may be said to have 
thrown the children, by a species of reaction, rather 
decidedly into the study of English literature. They 
read poetry, tales, and wholesome old books, and began 
very early to try their hand at writing. Neither the 
early writings nor the early pictures of the child seem 
to have been markedly promising, but it is interesting 
that he preferred imaginative designs, such as scenes 
from Shakespeare, to transcriptions of natural objects, 
and chose to create rather than copy. 

The only one of the early writings which deserves 
a passing mention, from the fact that it is a biblio- 
graphical curiosity, is a poem in four parts called 
Sir Hugh the Heron, which was written at the age of 
twelve, and printed in 1843 by his grandfather, Mr. 
Polidori, who had then moved into London, at a private 
printing-press which he had set up. 



I.] EARLY YEARS 9 

An interesting autobiographical reminiscence of his 
early days occurs in a mystical story, St. Agnes 
of Intercession, written at a later date. " Among 
my earliest recollections, none is stronger than that 
of my father standing before the fire when he came 
home in the London winter evenings, and singing to 
us in his sweet, generous tones ; sometimes ancient 
English ditties, — such songs as one might translate 
from the birds, and the brooks might set to music ; 
sometimes those with which foreign travel had 
familiarised his youth, — among them the great tunes 
which have rung the world's changes since '89. I 
used to sit on the hearthrug, listening to him, and 
look between his knees into the fire till it burned 
my face, while the sights swarming up in it seemed 
changed and changed with the music : till the music 
and the fire and my heart burned together, and I 
would take paper and pencil, and try in some childish 
way to fix the shapes that rose within me. For my 
hope, even then, was to be a painter." 

The boy went in 1836 to a day-school in Portland 
Place, and to King's College School in 1837, where he 
stayed till 1842. Here, he learned Latin and French 
well, German fairly, and Greek but a little. He had 
some linguistic aptitude, but held science and mathe- 
matics in contempt. He was said to have been a 
quiet, affectionate boy, courageous, kind, and con- 
siderate of others. But his own recollection was 
different. He described himself to Mr. Hall Caine as 
having been destitute of personal courage, shrinking 
from the amusements of his schoolfellows, and fearful 
of their quarrels, selfish, though not without some gen- 
erous impulses, and reclusive in habits. The truth 



10 ROSSETTI [chap. 

probably is that he was intensely preoccupied, like all 
children of strong individuality, with his own ideas 
and dreams, and apt to resent anything that diverted 
the current of them ; but he was pre-eminently genial 
and sociable by nature, and it is impossible that he 
should not have displayed these qualities to a certain 
extent when at school. He was always a favourite 
with simple people, servants, shoe-blacks, organ- 
grinders, and never had, to the end of his life, the 
faintest consciousness of or subservience to social posi- 
tion. No doubt the uncongenial atmosphere of school 
threw him back decidedly upon the circle of home 
interests. He appears to have made no special friends 
at school. 

In 1842 it was decided that Kossetti had received a 
sufficient education, and that his professional life had 
better begin. He was bent on becoming an artist, 
though it does not appear that up to this date his 
drawings had shown any special promise. It is inter- 
esting that he seems to have been allowed to have 
his own way in the matter, as the household must 
have been under the pressure of considerable anxiety 
owing to the failing health of Gabriele Rossetti. He 
went first to the drawing academy of Mr. F. S, Gary 
in Bloomsbury Street. He was there for four years. 
He appears to have been irregular in attendance, and 
with moods of brusquerie and unapproachableness, 
alternating with hilarious gaiety and affectionate 
generosity. He paid little heed to Gary's instruc- 
tions, but followed his own methods. "Why were 
you not here yesterday ? " says his instructor, accord- 
ing to the legend. " I had a fit of idleness," says the 
pupil, and shortly after distributes a sheaf of verses 



I.] EARLY YEARS 11 

among the stvideuts. He said once to his brother, 
many years after, "As soon as a thing is imposed on 
me as an obligation, my aptitnde for doing it is gone ; 
what I ought to do is what I cayiH do." His imagina- 
tion was, however, strongly stirred by the exhibition 
of some cartoons in Westminster Hall, prior to the 
decoration of the Houses of Parliament. Here he first 
saw the work of Ford Madox Brown, and recognised 
a new spirit at work, a spirit of originality and 
fidelity, of revolt against stereotyped traditions. This 
had an important bearing on his after career. He 
entered the Antique School of the Royal Academy in 
1846, and there is an interesting description of his 
appearance in those days, given by a fellow-student. 
"Thick, beautiful, and closely curled masses of rich 
brown much-neglected hair fell about an ample brow, 
and almost to the wearer's shoulders; strong eyebrows 
marked [masked ?] with their dark shadows a pair of 
rather sunken eyes, in which a sort of fire, instinct with 
what may be called proud cynicism, burned with furtive 
energy. His rather high cheekbones were the more 
observable because his cheeks were roseless and hollow 
enough to indicate the waste of life and midnight oil 
to which the youth was addicted. Close shaving left 
bare his very full, not to say sensuous lips, and square- 
cut masculine chin. Rather below the middle height, 
and with a slightly rolling gait, Rossetti came forward 
among his fellows with a jerky step, tossed the falling 
hair back from his face, and, having both hands in his 
pockets, faced the student world with an insouciant air 
which savoured of thorough self-reliance. A bare 
throat, a falling, ill-kept collar, boots not over-familiar 
with brushes, black and well-worn habiliments, includ- 



12 ROSSETTI [chap. 

ing not the ordinary jacket of the period, but a loose 
dress-coat which had once been new — these were the 
outward and visible signs of a mood which cared even 
less for appearances than the art-student of those days 
was accustomed to care, which undoubtedly was little 
enough." 

Mr. Holman Hunt says that, on speaking to him, the 
impression of his insouciance was much modified; "he 
proved to be courteous, gentle, and winsome, generous 
in compliment, rich in interest in the pursuits of 
others, and in every respect ... a cultivated gentle- 
man." 

At this time Eossetti's intellectual ardour was very 
great. He read Shelley and Keats with profound 
admiration, and many other poets; in prose he had a 
taste for the legendary, the strange, the supernatural, 
combined with a great relish for humorous writing of 
any kind. He eschewed philosophy, science, history, 
and politics. In 1847 he discovered Browning, and 
everything else sank into the background : he revelled 
in the passion, the dramatic perception, the mediaeval- 
ism of Browning. He wrote a prose romance called 
Sorrentino, the ms. of which he afterwards destroyed. 
He began to translate the Nibelungenlied. He had also 
taken up Dante and the Italian lyrists, and translated 
everything that pleased him, including Dante's Vita 
Naova. Some of these translations were shown to 
Tennyson, who pronounced the work to be strong and 
earnest, but disfigured by superficial faults. But 
what is still more striking is that, before entering his 
twentieth year, he had written The Blessed Damozel, in 
many respects his finest and most characteristic poem; 
moreover, in the next year or two he wrote the Ave, the 



I.] EARLY YEARS 13 

beginning of Dante at Verona, The Last Confession, The 
BricWs Prelade,Sind an original draft of Jenny, oi whicli 
the greater part was afterwards cancelled. The whole 
period gives the impression of intense vitality and 
strength, but it is even more remarkable to find how 
early maturity was reached. He seems to have served 
no patient apprenticeship in literature, but to have 
come suddenly and swiftly into the possession of his 
full inheritance. 

A good instance of his poetical insight is revealed 
by the fact that he fell in with an anonymous book at 
the British Museum called Pauline, which he admired 
sufficiently to copy out; he came to the conclusion 
that this must be the work of Robert Browning, and 
wrote to him to ask if it was so. Browning replied 
in the affirmative, from Venice ; but it was not till two 
years after that the poets met. 

In 1848 Rossetti, yielding to impulse in a character- 
istic way, wrote a remarkable letter to Ford Madox 
Brown. He said that he had always admired his 
"glorious" work. "I have always listened with 
avidity if your name happened to be mentioned, and 
rushed first of all to your number in the catalogue." 
The letter goes on to say that Brown's pictures had 
kept him "standing on the same spot for fabulous 
lengths of time." He concludes by asking that Madox 
Brown would accept him as a pupil, as he desired " to 
obtain some knowledge of colour." 

Mr. W. M. Rossetti says that his brother was sick 
of the slow progress of his artistic education, and 
desired just to gain sufficient technical knowledge of 
brush-work to start upon original designs. 

Madox Brown was twenty-seven at this date. He 



14 ROSSETTI [chap. 

was already working in the spirit of the artistic creed 
which he afterwards formulated in the two words 
" emotional truth." Neither then nor later did he re- 
ceive adequate recognition, though he slowly emerges 
as one of the most profound and impressive painters 
of the century. He appears to have been astonished 
by the letter, and particularly by the lavish praise 
it contained, as he was by no means accustomed 
to be so admiringly regarded. He seems to have 
imagined that some jest was intended, and marched 
straight to Rossetti's house with a stout stick. Madox 
Brown was a vigorous-looking man of formidable 
aspect, with a strongly marked face. He knocked 
at the door at 50 Charlotte Street,^ and desired 
to see Rossetti, but would not come in or give his 
name. Rossetti came down. " Is your name Rossetti, 
and is this your writing ? " he asked. Rossetti re- 
plied that it was. " What do you mean by it ? " said 
Madox Brown, in his distinct and slow articulation. 
Rossetti explained that he meant what he said, and 
Madox Brown, seeing that the request was genuine, 
accepted him on the spot as a pupil and declined to 
accept, with characteristic indifference to money, any 
payment. Rossetti went almost immediately after- 
wards to the studio, and was at once, to his disgust, 
set down to paint some pickle-jars. 

At this date Rossetti made two friends among the 
Academy students, whose association with him made a 
great difference in his life. These were Mr. Holman 
Hunt, about a year older than himself, and John 
Everett Millais, a year younger. Rossetti had seen Mr. 
Hunt's picture Tlie Eve of St. Agnes in the Academy, 

1 To which house the Rossettis had removed in 1836. 



I.] EARLY YEARS 15 

and had said boisterously that it was the best picture 
of the year. Through Mr. Hunt, Rossetti got to know 
Millais well, having previously been on terms of mere 
acquaintanceship with him. Millais had already 
exhibited several pictures, and was regarded as a 
paragon of promise. Mr. Hunt advised Rossetti, who 
had loudly lamented the degrading character of the 
work he was doing, to begin a large picture, and gain 
technique by using the still-life objects which he was 
set to paint as direct pictorial accessories to it. Ros- 
setti eventually chose Tlie Girlhood of Ifary Virgin as 
a subject. 

But Rossetti was still doubtful at this time as to 
whether he should definitely take up art or literature. 
He wrote to Leigh Hunt, to whom he was unknown, 
sending him some of his poems and translations, and 
asking his advice. Leigh Hunt replied in a very 
kindly letter, which is preserved. He seems, like 
Tennyson, to have been impressed with the roughness 
of the versification in the translations. " I guess 
indeed," he wrote, " that you are altogether not so 
musical as pictorial." But Leigh Hunt expressed him- 
self most generously about the original poems, seeing 
in them the work of " an unquestionable poet, thought- 
ful, imaginative, and with rare powers of expression. 
I hailed you as such at once, without any misgiving." 
He concludes with some kindly words warning the 
aspirant against thinking of poetry as a profession. 
"Poetry," he says, "... is not a thing for a man' to 
live upon while he is in the flesh, however immortal it 
may render him in spirit." 

Rossetti joined Mr. Holm an Hunt in a studio in 
Cleveland Street (now No. 46 Fitzroy Square), a dismal 



16 ROSSETTI [chap. 

and squalid place, looking out upon a timber-yard, and 
rendered additionally disagreeable by the fact that a 
boys' school was kept in the house. 

The friendship with Millais was established one 
night at Millais' house (7 Gower Street), where 
Millais, the only one of the group whose family was 
in easy circumstances, worked in a long, shed-like 
studio at the back of the house. There they turned 
over a book of engravings by Lasinio of the frescoes 
by early masters in the Campo Santo at Pisa — en- 
gravings which Euskin calls execrable. This was in 
August 1848, and the incident was to have important 
consequences. 

I cannot but believe that his early entourage had a 
great and lasting effect, both in poetry and art, upon 
so perceptive a spirit as Eossetti's. In these first 
years, except for half a dozen visits to the country, to 
Chalfont and Little Missenden, and a few weeks at 
Boulogne, he knew nothing of the country pure and 
simple. He was thus, I think, thrown strongly back 
into himself, and the desire for beauty driven into 
one special channel. He has delicate and informing 
touches of natural observation in his poetry. But so 
eager an eye for beauty is bound to feed itself upon 
what it sees, and one can imagine Eossetti, like 
Leonardo da Vinci, wandering about the streets in 
search of rare and remote types of human expression. 
The landscape both of his pictures and poems is rather 
of the pictorial than of the natural order, imagined 
ideal places, gardens seen in dreams, with a tender 
light of evening over lawns and thick-grown trees. 

Moreover, the time at which natural impressions 
sink deepest is when they are studied with the relent- 



I.] EARLY YEARS 17 

less, inquisitive gaze, tlie eager curiosity, the busy 
hands of childhood. Natural phenomena are not at 
an early age interpreted or apprehended in the light 
of beauty, but the harvest is then gathered and the 
habit acquired ; and thus the early London life no 
doubt accounts for the fact that Rossetti's natural 
imagery does not rise, as it were, out of a full source, 
but consists more of little effects noted in some 
moment of country observation. 

There is an interesting fragment of autobiography 
in the St. Agnes which deserves to be quoted here : — 

"Any artist or thoughtful man whatsoever, whose life has 
passed in a large city, can scarcely fail, in course of time, to 
have some association connecting each spot continually passed 
and repassed with the labours of his own mind. In the woods 
and fields every place has its proper spell and mystery, and 
needs no consecration from thought ; but wherever in the 
daily walk through the thronged and jarring city, the soul has 
read some knowledge from life, or laboured towards some 
birth within its own silence, there abides the glory of that 
hour, and the cloud rests there before an unseen tabernacle." 



CHAPTER II 

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 

In the autumn of 1848 the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite 
brotherhood was constituted. We may trace in this 
little society, which was destined to have a profound 
though indirect effect on English art, the dominant 
mind of Rossetti. He had a mind and a character 
which, without any assumption of superiority, naturally 
took the lead in any group of which he was a member, 
from sheer force of will, absolute knowledge of his 
own mind, intensity of purpose, and a kind of royal 
generosity which recognised ungrudgingly and pro- 
claimed unhesitatingly the merits of others. The 
combination was irresistible : few men can resist the 
dominion of will, intellectual force allied with noble 
sympathy. 

The name was not a new one. In 1810 two Ger- 
man painters, Cornelius and Overbeck, had founded 
a society in Rome, called the German Pre-Raphaelite 
Brethren. The basis of this institution seems to have 
been rather religious than artistic, and was a protest 
against the prevailing irreligion of the art and artists 
of the day. The members practised a species of 
monastic seclusion, and arrayed themselves in a 
religious garb of cassocks with rope-girdles. By this 

18 



CHAP. II.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 19 

school the name Pre-Raphaelite was chosen because 
the earlier Italian painters were mostly of a monastic 
type and consecrated their art to the decoration of 
sacred buildings. 

There was no such idea in the minds of our English 
Pre-Raphaelites. The genesis of the name appears in 
a letter written in August 1848, by Rossetti, to his 
brother William. He says that he has been reading 
Lord Houghton's Life and Letters of Keats, then just 
published. " He [Keats] seems to have been a glorious 
fellow, and says in one place (to my great delight) that, 
having just looked over a folio of the first and second 
schools of Italian painting, he has come to the conclusion 
that the early men surpassed even Raphael himself ! " 

The central idea of the Pre-Raphaelite movement was 
a revolt against conventionality. The Pre-Raphaelites 
thought that the English school of painters had fallen 
'into a thoroughly insincere manner. They felt that 
the English genre school, originated by Hogarth, whom 
they valued for his hard observation and firm natural- 
ism, had degenerated in the hands of Wilkie, Leslie, and 
Mulready — kindly, childlike masters — into a school 
of painting characterised by conventional optimism 
and trivial humour, whose works appealed to the heart 
rather than to the mind and eye. The Pre-Raphaelites 
contemned the feeble device of ''anecdotal," familiar 
or melodramatic subjects. They believed that English 
painters valued little but pretentious, theatrical, and ele- 
mentary effects, and traded with cheap emotions, false 
pathos, sentimental ideas. They saw no fundamental 
conception, no poetical imagination, no faithful delinea- 
tion. In the designs of Blake alone, whom they were 
almost the first to appreciate at his true worth, they 



20 ROSSETTI [chap. 

discerned a poetical imagination and an independent 
spirit at work. They even contemned the great 
English portrait-painters. Even Reynolds did not 
escape, being called " Sloshna " by Millais, a name 
suggested by the adjective " sloshy," which they ap- 
plied freely to all indefinite, feeble, and superficial 
work. They felt that the disadvantage of the appear- 
ance of a painter like Raphael, with the inimitable 
perfection of technique and tranquil sublimity of con- 
ception, was that he had influenced too deeply the art 
of his successors, and tended to destroy originality of 
design. They maintained that artists ought to paint 
things as they saw them, and not as they thought 
Raphael would have seen them. They did not take 
the earlier painters as a model, but they wished to re- 
vert to the principles of an artistic age when a strong 
and dominating tradition was not at work, but when 
painters developed art on their own lines with sturdy 
fidelity, masculine individuality, and serious intention. 
In these early masters, from Giotto to Leonardo — for 
they had no great knowledge of Flemish or German 
schools — they saw an unspoiled delight in art, a 
genuine devotion, a loving labour which, besides a 
stirring spiritual intention, had a homely veracity of 
presentment. In one sense these ancient painters were 
conventional, but it was only a conventionality of 
technique, not of conception, and did not override the 
original impulse of the artist. It was, in fact, a time 
of enthusiastic development, of workers not hampered 
with the consciousness of an overpowering treasure of 
unsurpassable production. 

The Pre-Raphaelites did not propose to confine them- 
selves to realistic subjects. In the mediaeval pictures, 



II.] THE TRE-RAPHAELITES 21 

for instance, of Rossetti, there is no antiquarian attempt 
to reproduce exactly the surroundings tliat must have 
figured in tlie original scene. The convention which 
mediaivalises the scenes of the Gospel story they ac- 
cepted without question. But they set themselves 
rather to conceive a subject in a serious and lofty 
way, and then to see that the details were presented 
with a strict and austere veracity. But this elabora- 
tion of detail was not an essential part of the prin- 
ciples of the Brotherhood. Mr. Holman Hunt says 
that it was undertaken principally with the idea of 
arriving at a perfection of technique. "We should 
never have admitted that the relinquishment of this 
habit of work by a matured painter would make hiui 
less of a Pre-Raphaelite." 

In technique, the Pre-Raphaelites began with a clean 
canvas, and built up their pictures bit by bit, like a 
mosaic, finishing, as far as might be, each piece of the 
work, without retouching, before another was begun. 
But Rossetti did not adhere strictly to this system, 
except perhaps in one or two of his earliest produc- 
tions. The Brotherhood used primary colours, and 
avoided low tones and dark backgrounds, which were 
at that time the fashion ; and instead of aiming at 
harmony by concentrating colour and working away 
from a point, they developed each individual portion 
with the same fidelity. The mistake was that 
colours do not, in a scene as it appears to the eye, 
stand alone, but are modified by the juxtaposition of 
other colours. Thus a scene studied with isolated 
attention to the details is apt to wear a hardness and 
harshness which do not reproduce the scene as it 
appears to the eye. 



22 ROSSETTI [chap. 

The three founders of the Brotherhood elected into 
the fraternity Woolner the sculptor, the painter James 
Collinson, F. G. Stephens, since well known as an art 
critic, and W. M. Rossetti, who was to uphold the 
principles of the Brotherhood in literature, and was 
appointed Secretary. Madox Brown would not join, 
saying bluntly that he disapproved of coteries. But, in 
spite of Rossetti's urgent desire, it appears that he was 
not actually invited, on the grounds of age, the " grimly 
grotesque " character of his works, and the fact that he 
did not render natural objects with sufficient minute- 
ness. Stephens had already some acquaintance with 
early art ; but Woolner and Collinson had none and 
acquired little. In fact, it may be said that it was the 
fidelity and simplicity of early art, rather than its 
archaic character, which attracted the Brotherhood. 

The principles of the Brotherhood embraced litera- 
ture as eagerly as art, a fact which is sometimes lost 
sight of. Indeed, we find Millais, in the Journal of 
the P.R.B., hard at work upon a poem. 

There ensued a time of boundless aspiration, enthu- 
siastic companionship, and vivid discussion. The 
members were all comparatively poor men, and their 
festivities were of the simplest description. *' Each 
man of the company," says Mr. W. M. Rossetti, " even 
if he did not project great things of his own, revelled 
in poetry or sunned himself in art." *' Rossetti," says 
Mr. Holman Hunt, " had then perhaps a greater 
acquaintance with the poetical literature of Europe 
than any living man. His storehouse of treasures 
seemed inexhaustible." 

Mr. Hunt and Collinson (who afterwards became a 
Roman Catholic) had a strong Christian biasj but the 



II.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 23 

dominant influence of Rossetti held the attention of 
the Brotherhood closely upon art and literature. 

One point is important. It was strongly held in 
the Brotherhood that purity of mind and heart was 
a necessary condition for good work, and all that was 
gross or sensual was strictly tabooed. It is clear that 
this band of enthusiasts were men of untainted lives, 
and though they probably had little respect for purely 
conventional morality, they had a deep-seated desire 
for nobility of life and aim. 

Mr. W. M. Rossetti kept a diary of the work and 
progress of the Brotherhood, which has been published. 
But the passages which would probably have cast 
most light on the proceedings of his brother have 
disappeared. At some period about 1855, Rossetti in- 
spected the book, and arbitrarily tore out and mutilated 
a number of pages. 

The Brotherhood settled down sturdily to work. 
Rossetti had chosen as his subject Hie Girlhood of Mary 
Virgin, a picture on canvas thirty-three by twenty-five 
inches. Mr. Holman Hunt describes his method of 
working. "When he had once sat down and was 
immersed in the effort to express his purpose, and the 
difficulties had to be wrestled with, his tongue was 
hushed, he remained fixed, and inattentive to all 
that went on about him ; he rocked himself to and 
fro, and at times he moaned lowly or hummed for a 
brief minute." 

In 1849 Millais and Hunt had a picture each in the 
Academy, and Rossetti one in the " Free Exhibition " 
near Hyde Park Corner. These pictures were well 
received, the P.R.B. initials which appeared on the 
pictures being passed over without comment. Rossetti 



24 KOSSETTI [chap. 

received a brief laudatory notice in the Athenceum. 
TJie Girlhood of Mary Virgin is called " a manifesta- 
tion of true mental power" with "a dignified and 
intellectual purpose." The picture was sold to the 
Dowager Marchioness of Bath, in whose family Miss 
Charlotte Polidori, Rossetti's aunt, was governess, at 
his own price. 

But in 1850 it was far different. Rossetti's picture 
Ecce Ancilla Domini, now in the Tate Gallery, was 
exhibited in the National Institution. Eossetti, who 
had a great deal of trouble over this picture, used to 
refer to it humorously as " the blessed white eyesore," 
or " the blessed white daub." At the same time the 
meaning of the mystic initials P.R.B. was divulged, 
and the members were wrathfully chastised. The 
Athenceum published a very severe criticism of Ros- 
setti's picture, in which it took occasion to lecture the 
Brotherhood collectively. They were said to ignore 
all the great principles of art, and to be " the slavish 
imitators of artistic inefticiency." Rossetti's picture 
was called crotchety, puerile, pedantic, affected, absurd. 
The face of the Virgin was said to be ill-drawn, and 
that of the Angel insipid. The picture was said to be 
'' a work evidently thrust by the artist into the eye of 
the spectator more with the presumption of a teacher 
than in the modesty of a hopeful and true aspiration 
after excellence." The Times wrote in somewhat the 
same strain, but recognised the picture as the work of 
a poet. Millais and Mr. Holman Hunt received still 
harsher treatment. In 1851 the Times attacked the 
work of the Pre-Raphaelite school still more vehemently, 
speaking of "affected simplicity, senile imitations of a 
cramped style, false perspective, crude colours, morbid 



II.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 25 

infatuation, and the sacrifice of beauty, trutli, and 
genuine feeling, to mere eccentricity." 

Tliis drew from Ruskin two letters to the Times 
(May 13 and 30), in which he bore strong testimony 
to the " truth, power, and finish " of the pictures, — 
" both as studies of drapery and of every minor 
detail," he said, " there has been nothing in art so 
earnest or so complete as these pictures since the 
days of Albert Dtirer." The immediate cause of the 
letters was the fact that Coventry Patmore found that 
Millais was in great distress and agitation at the 
attacks made upon him, and went straight off to 
Ruskin begging him to use his influence in the cause 
of justice. 

These letters, " as thunder out of a clear sky," as 
Mr. Hunt said, turned the current of public feeling. 
Mr. Hunt, who had been proposing to emigrate to 
Canada as a farmer, set to work on the Hireling 
ShejjJierxl, and Millais on his Ophelia, the face being 
drawn from Miss Siddal, whom Rossetti afterwards 
married. 

Rossetti about this time designed his great picture 
Found, a picture which stands apart from the bulk 
of his pictorial work as Jenny does from his poetical 
writing, as a picture of a genre order. It is certainly 
his most characteristic Pre-Raphaelite work, perhaps 
his greatest achievement, though it was never com- 
pleted. 

But just at this time, when Rossetti, from a 
practical point of view, should have been throwing 
himself with full energy into his artistic work, he 
turned aside to poetry : he wrote or rewrote Sister 
Helen, The Bride's Prelude, Dante at Verona, A Last 



26 ROSSETTI [chap. 

Confession, Jenny, TJie Burden of Nineveh, and other 
poems that belong to his finest work. These poems 
were written easily, but slowly improved upon, with 
innumerable retouchings. 

This desultory neglect of his professional work, so 
characteristic of Rossetti in his earlier days, and so 
unlike his later habits, drew from his father strong 
and sharp remonstrances. Rossetti never took blame 
easily, though he replied affectionately enough, in a 
letter which has been preserved ; but then and after- 
wards his affectionate nature grieved over the fact 
that their relations had ever been strained. But the 
vexation of Gabriele E-ossetti was not unnatural. He 
was himself incapacitated from work, and the house- 
hold was mainly depending upon the unremunerative 
attempts of Mrs. Rossetti and her two daughters to 
give Italian lessons. Rossetti acquiesced, and wrote 
in 1852 that he had abandoned poetry. 

The interest of the Pre-Raphaelite period is twofold. 
It is partly that so many of the group rose to high 
eminence afterwards ; but the scene has an intrinsic 
beauty of its own. It has the eternal charm of 
generous and enthusiastic youth. Rossetti steps out, 
like Ion on the temple platform, with the virginal 
freshness of the opening day about him, intent 
upon his holy service. To read of these days, 
untainted by passion, unshadowed by the sombre 
clouds that darken the later life of even the most 
generous spirits, is like listening to young and care- 
less voices breaking the stillness of the morning 
air in some enchanted landscape of falling streams 
and dewy thickets. The practised and patient efforts 
of later days, when faithful hand and brain wrought 



II.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 27 

out into substance those youthful dreams, is perhaps 
a nobler spectacle ; but it is like a draught of fresh 
spring-water to recall the life of so gifted and hopeful 
a circle, and to revive the ardent dreams of youth in 
all their incomparable brightness and strength. 

The Germ was an enterprise of the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood which owed both inception and execution 
to the stubborn mind of Eossetti. The idea was to 
publish a sixpenny monthly magazine which was to 
be (fxjjvavTa avveTOLCTLv. It was not to aim at blowing 
a loud and rebellious blast, at attacking existing 
institutions and modes of thought, however un- 
enlightened ; it was rather to hold up an example 
of how art should be treated — humbly, faithfully, 
reverently. It was to be a Seed, as one of the latest 
rejected titles ran, or a Scroll, as the last suggestion 
stood, containing a prophetic message. Eventually 
the Germ — a curiously infelicitous title both in sound 
and association — was selected. It may be said to 
be one of the few instances where Rossetti's extra- 
ordinary instinct for impressive titles failed to make 
itself felt. Rossetti's first suggestion was to call it 
Tlwxights toioards Nature, which was abandoned as 
being cumbrous as Avell as affected. Each number 
was to contain prose, both original and critical, poetry, 
and an etching. There was a sonnet by Mr. W. M. 
Rossetti, reprinted on the title-page of each number, 
which states the principles of the brotherly band so 
clearly and gracefully that some of it may be quoted — 

" When whoso merely hath a little thought 

Will plainly think the thought which is in him — 
Not imaging another's bright or dim, 
Not mangling with new words what others taught ; 



28 ROSSETTI [chap. 

When whoso speaks, from having either sought 
Or only found, — will speak, not just to skim 
A shallow surface with words made and trim, 

But in that very speech the matter brought . . •" 

The sonnet goes on to deprecate hasty and con- 
temptuous criticism, but bids the spectator ask himself 
patiently, "Is this truth ?" The productions of the 
Brotherhood were thus to be things independently 
seen or conceived, and independently, not imitatively, 
expressed, with fidelity and patience. 

The first number contained some remarkable writing. 
There were two poems by Wooluer of considerable 
originality and charm, 3Iy Beautiful Lady and Of my 
Lady in Death; an interesting essay. The Subject in 
Art, by J. L. Tupper, which" though without form, and 
written in a singularly breathless prose, like an extem- 
pore address, is full of suggestive ideas. Coventry 
Patmore contributed a beautiful little poem ; Christina 
Eossetti a couple of lyrics, afterwards famous. Rossetti 
himself sent My Sister^s Sleep, and a very interesting 
prose romance, Hand and Soid, which will be con- 
sidered later in detail. On the last page was a 
species of pronouncement as to the principles of the 
magazine, "to encourage and enforce an entire adhe- 
rence to the simplicity of Nature." 

Not more than two hundred copies of the seven 
hundred of the first issue were sold. The second 
number was even less successful. Its most famous 
contribution is The Blessed Damozel, which will be 
considered elsewhere. 

After the comparative failure of this number, it 
became clear that the finances of the Brotherhood 
were no longer equal to the strain of publication. 



II.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 29 

But two more numbers were brought out by the 
friendly printing firm, the Tuppers, and the title was 
changed to Art ayid Poetry : Being Tliouglits towards 
Nature. 

Among the poetical contributions to the third num- 
ber appear From the Cliffs: Noon, by D. G. Rossetti, 
afterwards rechristened Sea Limits, and a beautiful 
poem Tlie Carillon, written on a tour in Belgium. 
There is a certain gauntness and stiffness about this, 
and an almost childish simplicity of phrase ; but it 
has the charm of directness and freshness in a singular 
degree. It appears in the collected works under the 
title of Antiverp and Bruges. The last number contains 
six sonnets by D. G. Rossetti on various pictures. Of 
these the most famous is A Venetian Pastoral, by 
Giorgione. The alterations made in this sonnet at a 
later date are so interesting and characteristic that one 
may be quoted. The concluding lines ran originally — 

" Let be : 
Do not now speak unto her lest she weep, 
Nor name this ever. Be it as it was: 
Silence of heat and solemn poetry." 

In 1869, just before Eossetti issued his Poems (1870), 
he wrote a long letter consulting his brother on various 
critical points and projected alterations. He had re- 
written the concluding lines of the sonnet thus — 

" Let be : 
Say nothing now unto her lest she weep, 
Nor name this ever. Be it as it was, 
Life touching lips with immortality." 

He adds the following interesting comment on the last 
line : — 

"... The old line seems to me quite bad, ' Solemn 



80 ROSSETTI [chap. 

poetry ' belongs to the class of phrase absolutely 
forbidden, I think, in poetry. It is intellectually 
incestuous, — poetry seeking to beget its emotional 
offspring on its own identity. Whereas I see noth- 
ing too ' ideal ' in the present line. It gives only the 
momentary contact with the immortal which results 
from sensuous culmination, and is always a half-con- 
scious element of it." 

A few words may be said about the etchings which 
appear in the Germ. One was prepared by Rossetti 
for No. 3, to illustrate Hmid and Soul, which had 
appeared in the first number; but Rossetti was so 
much dissatisfied with the proof that he characteristi- 
cally tore it up and scratched the plate over. Madox 
Brown came to the rescue with an etching of Cordelia 
in I\ing Lear. 

The Germ presents no typographical attractions. It 
is feebly printed and is adorned with poor thin black- 
letter headings. Yet this little magazine, a set of which 
is a rare bibliographical curiosity, has a significance of 
a very marked kind. It is all fragrant of sincere and 
enthusiastic youth and artistic purpose. It suggests a 
whole background of ardent impulsive figures, inspired 
by a generous emotion, and determined to see things 
with their own eyes and to say them in their own way. 
Thus though the little pages are glorified by the dis- 
tinction which so many of the groiip afterwards 
achieved, the Germ has a real and intrinsic value of 
its own. 

Rossetti at this period often shifted his quarters. 
He gave up the studio in Cleveland Street which he 
had shared with Hunt ; and it is odd that in 1849 he 
should have looked at the house, 16 Cheyne Walk, 



II.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 31 

Chelsea, in which he was afterwards to live for nearly 
twenty years. He went to 72 Newman Street, where, 
a distraint being levied for rent, the effects of Kossetti 
were seized to make good the landlord's default. He 
then went to 74 Newman Street, still sleeping at home. 
In 1851 he took with a friend, Deverell, a first floor 
at 17 Red Lion Square, and then for a time shared 
Mr. Madox Brown's studio at 17 Newman Street. But 
at the end of 1852 he moved into 14 Chatham Place, 
Blackfriar's Bridge, a house now demolished. Here 
he had a studio, a sitting-room and a bedroom with 
a fine outlook on the river, and here he remained for 
nearly ten years. 

In 1854 began a close friendship with Ruskin which 
lasted for eight years. On April 14th of that year 
Rossetti wrote to Madox Brown: "McCracken^ of 
course sent my drawing [_Dante Drawing an Angel in 
Memory of Beatrice'] to Ruskin, who the other day wrote 
me an incredible letter about it, remaining mine respect- 
fully (! !), and wanting to call. I of course stroked him 
down in my answer, and yesterday he called. His man- 
ner was more agreeable than I had always expected. 
. . . He seems in a mood to make my fortune." 

Ruskin was then nearly ten years older than 
Rossetti. The two men were of course in a very 
different position : Rossetti was poor, young, and com- 
paratively unknown; Ruskin was wealthy and emi- 
nent in the artistic and literary world. He formed a 
very high estimate of Rossetti's powers, and behaved 
to him with extraordinary generosity, making an ar- 
rangement whereby up to a certain sum he would 

lA Belfast shipping-agent, who was a large purchaser of 
Rossetti's pictures. 



32 EOSSETTI [chap. 

purchase any of Eossetti's paintings of which he 
approved. 

In 1855 Ruskin wrote : " It seems to me that, amongst 
all the painters I know, you on the whole have the 
greatest genius, and you appear to me also to be — as 
far as I can make out — a very good sort of person. 
I see that you are unhappy, and that you can't bring 
out your genius as you should. It seems to me then 
the proper and necessary thing, if I can, to make you 
more happy, and that I should be more really useful 
in enabling you to paint properly and keep your room 
in order than in any other way." 

This arrangement put Eossetti in a secure position, 
and left him free to work as he liked. It is doubtful 
whether the arrangement was wholly salutary for the 
young artist. He was acutely sensitive to criticism, 
and it may be questioned whether this species of 
" protection " did not tend to stunt his artistic develop- 
ment. Indeed it seems to have confirmed his dislike 
of public exhibition, for from this time forth he never 
sent any of his work to any of the ordinary galleries. 

Euskin seems to have constituted himself a kind 
of amiable meutor to Eossetti, both artistically and 
practically. He found liberal fault, in a good-humoured, 
fussy old-maidish way, with his methods of drawing 
and his use of pigmeiits, and strove to inculcate habits 
of orderliness and diligence. The letters which he 
wrote Eossetti have been preserved, and are highly 
entertaining. 

Thus he wrote in October 1854 : — 

" 1 forgot to say also that I really do covet your 
drawings as much as I covet Turner's ; only it is 
useless self-indulgence to buy Turner's, and useful self- 



n.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 33 

indulgence to buy yours. Only I won't have them 
after they have been more than nine times rubbed 
entirely out — remember that." 

Again — "You are a conceited monkey thinking 
your pictures right when I tell you positively they are 
wrong. What do you know about the matter, I should 
like to know ? " 

" Please put a dab of Chinese white into the hole in 
the cheek and paint it over. People will say that 
Beatrice has been giving the other bridesmaids a ' pre- 
destinate scratched face ' ; also a white-faced bridesmaid 
behind is very ugly to look at — like a skull or body in 
corruption." 

Again — " You are a very odd creature, that's a fact. 
I said I would find funds for you to go into Wales 
to draw something I wanted. I never said I would 
for you to go to Paris, to disturb yourself and other 
people, and I won't. 

" I am ill-tempered to-day. ... I don't say you do 
wrong, because you don't seem to know what is wrong, 
but do just whatever you like as far as possible — as 
puppies and tomtits do. However, as it is so, I must 
think for you." 

It was hardly possible that with Eossetti's nature 
this relation should have continued. The wonder is 
that it lasted so long. At first, no doubt, Rossetti ac- 
cepted criticism from Euskin from a consciousness of 
the high prestige which the latter enjoyed, and also, 
no doubt, being won by the tender and loving character 
of the man. But Eossetti had an intense individuality 
of his own, believed in his own methods, or rather 
perhaps knew his own limitations ; and as he became 
more secure in his own line, was no doubt less and less 



34 ROSSETTI [chap. 

inclined to brook paradoxical criticism or fantastic dic- 
tation. No doubt he held his own, though his replies 
have not been preserved ; but there was not much in 
common au fond between the two men. 

The friendship gradually died away without any 
definite rupture, and Rossetti went on his way alone. 
It is interesting to note that Ruskin afterwards said to 
a friend, that one of the main reasons which made him 
abjure the society of Rossetti, was that Rossetti domi- 
nated him intellectually to such an extent that he 
could not think his own thoughts when he was with 
him. After Rossetti's marriage there was but little 
intercourse, though Ruskin wrote in 1860 : — 

"I think Ida" (Mrs, Rossetti) "should be very 
happy to see how much more beautifully, perfectly, 
and tenderly you draw when you are drawing her than 
when you draw anybody else. She cures you of all 
your worst faults when you only look at her." 

Ruskin made some attempts to draw the widening 
gap together after Mrs. Rossetti's death. Thus in 
1862 he wrote : — 

" I do trust that henceforward I may be more with 
you — as I am able now better to feel your great 
powers of mind, and am myself more in need of the 
kindness with which they are joined. ... I've been 
thinking of asking if I could rent a room in your Chel- 
sea house." 

The last suggestion came to nothing. In 1865 Rus- 
kin began to be aware that a gradual severance was 
taking place. He wrote : — 

" [Your letters] conclusively showed me that we 
could not at present, nor for some time yet, be com- 
panions any more, though true friends, I hope, as 



II.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 35 

ever. ... I do not choose any more to talk to you 
until you can recognise my superiorities as / can yours. 
And this recognition, observe, is not a matter of will or 
courtesy. You simply do not see certain characters in 
me. ... A day may come when you will be able. 
Then — without apology — without restraint — merely 
as being different from what you are now — come back 
to me, and we will be as we used to be." 

After 1868 they never met again, though occasional 
letters passed between them. So died away this re- 
markable friendship. Great as Rossetti's tenderness 
was in the presence of a friend, he was too much pre- 
occupied with his work and his own thoughts to be 
pre-eminent for loyalty unless there was some natural 
tie of relationship or close association. 

I do not imagine that Rossetti, in spite of his extra- 
ordinary power of attaching others to himself, was apt 
to recur, with wistful affection, to those whom he had 
known and loved. This defect of sympathy may be 
held to be frequently characteristic of the strongly 
developed artistic nature, and Rossetti was one who 
pre-eminently lived in the present and in the dreams 
of the day. 

To return to our main narrative, an interesting little 
episode of the year 1854 was that Rossetti, infected by 
Ruskin's enthusiasm, volunteered to take a class in the 
Working Men's College, presided over by F. D. Maurice, 
in Great Ormond Street. Ruskin, in Frceterita, says 
generously, " It is to be remembered of Rossetti with 
loving honour, that he was the only one of our modern 
painters who taught disciples for love of them." 

Rossetti himself wrote to W. B. Scott : " You think 
I have turned humanitarian perhaps, but you should 



36 ROSSETTI [chap. 

see my class for tlie model ! None of your Freehand 
Draiving-BooTis used! The British mind is brought to 
bear on the British mxig at once, and with results that 
would astonish you." His method was characteristic : 
he put a model — a bird or a boy — before his class, 
and said "Do it." He did not begin with light and 
shade, but gave his pupils full colour at once. 

In 1857 Eossetti was brought into contact with 
another interesting group of men, and it is remarkable 
to observe how he stepped at once into a position of 
intellectual and emotional dominance among them. 
He was desired by Ruskin to do some designing work 
in connection with the Oxford Museum in 1855 which 
had been placed in the hands of the architect Benja- 
min Woodward. In 1857 he accompanied Woodward 
to Oxford, and saw the new debating room of the 
Union Society. He at once formed the idea of 
organising some co-operation in an attempt to adorn 
the bare wall-spaces with frescoes, or, more strictly, 
tempera pictures. He had in the previous year made 
the acquaintance of Burne-Jones and William Morris, 
and these were at once enlisted. Morris had intro- 
duced the Arthurian legends to Rossetti's attention, 
and Eossetti determined that the Arthurian legend 
should yield subjects for the frescoes. 

The project resulted in a melancholy failure. None 
of those engaged had had any experience in mural paint- 
ing ; the walls were damp ; the brickwork was merely 
covered with whitewash, and on this surface the 
frescoes were painted with small brushes, in tempera. 
The result is that the paintings were speedily ob- 
literated, and now glimmer like ghosts on the walls. 
Rossetti's own fresco, "Sir Lancelot's Vision of the 



II.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 37 

Sangrail," was never finished; but it was by common 
consent considered the finest of the series, belonging, 
as Burne-Jones said, "to the best time and highest 
character of his work." The figure of Lancelot was 
drawn from Burne-Jones himself — a sketch of the 
design exists. Lancelot lies asleep, while the Grail 
passes, borne by angels, and Queen Guinevere stands 
with arms outstretched before an apple-tree. 

But the most interesting part of the episode is the 
light which it throws on the influence which Rossetti 
established over men like Burne-Jones and Morris. 
It is recorded of the former that he once introduced 
a friend to Rossetti, telling him beforehand, " We 
shall see the greatest man in Europe." Morris was 
himself an extraordinarily self-willed and independent 
character. Yet for a time he was completely carried 
off his feet by Rossetti's influence. 

Burne-Jones was the first to succumb to the spell. 
He was then at Oxford, and destined for the Church, 
but had begun to make pen and ink designs on his 
own account, and having conceived a high idea of 
Rossetti's powers, called upon him and showed him 
some of his drawings. Burne-Jones's account of their 
first meeting is so remarkable that it may be quoted 
here : — 

" On the night appointed, about ten o'clock, I went to 
Lushington's rooms, where was a company of men, some of 
whom have been friends ever since. I remember Saffi was 
there, and a brother of Rossetti's. And by-and-bye Rossetti 
came and I was taken up to him and had my first fearful 
talk with him. Browning's Men and Women had just been 
published a few days before, and some one speaking dis- 
respectfully of that book was rent in pieces at once for his 
pains and was dumb for the rest of the evening, so that I 



38 ROSSETTI [chap. 

saw my hero could be a tyrant, and I thought it sat finely 
upon him. Also, another unwary man professed an interest 
in metaphysics ; he also was dealt with firmly ; so that our 
host was impelled to ask if Rossetti would have all men 
painters, and if there should be no other occupation for man- 
kind. Rossetti said stoutly that it was so. But before I left 
that night, Rossetti bade me come to his studio next day. It 
was at the top of the last house by Blackfriar's Bridge, at the 
north-west corner of the bridge, long ago pulled down to make 
way for the Embankment ; and I found him painting at a 
water-colour of a monk copying a mouse (^Fra Pace) in an 
illumination. . . . He received me very courteously, and asked 
much about Morris, one or two of whose poems he knew 
already, and I think that was our principal subject of talk, 
for he seemed much interested about him. He showed me 
many designs for pictures ; they tossed about everywhere in 
the room : the floor at one end was covered with them and 
with books. . . . No one seemed to be in attendance upon 
him. I stayed long and watched him at work, not knowing 
till many a day afterwards that this was a thing he greatly 
hated ; and when, for shame, I could stay no longer, I went 
away, having carefully concealed from him the desire I had 
to be a painter." 

The result of this was that Burne-Jones began to 
paint under Rossetti's guidance ; then William Morris 
was drawn into the net. 

The following is Morris's own account of the 
matter : — 

" I have seen Rossetti twice since I saw the last of you ; 
spent almost a whole day with him the last time, last Monday, 
that was. . . . Rossetti says I ought to paint, he says I shall 
be able ; now as he is a very great man and speaks with 
authority and not as the scribes, I must try. I don't hope 
much, I must say, yet will try my best — he gave me practi- 
cal advice on the subject. . . ." 

The submissive humility which breathes through 



11.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 39 

these statements is very unlike the sturdy and burly 
self-assertion of Morris's later attitude. He devoted 
himself for a time entirely to painting, and produced 
some beautifully handled work, in which the minute 
influence of Rossetti is apparent. Mr. Mackail, in his 
Life of William Morris, says : — 

" Rossetti's conquest of a mind so strong and so self- 
sufficing was, while it lasted, complete in proportion to the 
strength which was subdued. He became not only a pupil, 
but a servant. Once, when Burne- Jones complained that the 
designs he made in Rossetti's manner seemed better than his 
own original work, Mori-is answered with some vehemence, 
' I have got beyond that : I want to imitate Gabriel as much 
as I can.' Tlie new gospel was carried down to those of the 
set who still remained at Oxford, and they were all put to 
drawing or modelling as if their life depended on it." 

There followed a period of close comradeship. The 
following is Mr. Mackail's account of the habits of the 
friends : — 

" After Burne-Jones went to London at Easter, and began 
painting under the friendly guidance of Rossetti, Morris used 
to go up almost every week to spend the Sunday with him at 
his lodgings in Chelsea. He used to arrive on Saturday in 
time to see pictures at the Academy or elsewhere, and go to 
a play with Burne-Jones and Rossetti in the evening. After 
the play — if Rossetti's imperious impatience of bad acting 
or bad plays allowed them to sit it out — they would go with 
him to his rooms on the Embankment overlooking Blackfriar's 
Bridge, and sit there till three or four in the morning, talk- 
ing. All Sunday the talking, varied by reading of the Morte 
iV Arthur, went on in the Chelsea lodging, Rossetti often 
looking in upon the other two in the afternoon. On the 
Monday morning, Morris took the first train down to Oxford 
to be at Street's (the architect's) again when the office opened. 
During these months Rossetti's influence over him grew 
stronger and stronger. His doctrine that everybody should 



40 EOSSETTI [chap. 

be a painter, enforced with all the weight of his immense 
personality and an eloquence and plausibility in talk which 
all who knew him in those years describe as unparalleled in 
their experience, carried Morris for a time off his feet." 

The reverence with which the two younger men 
regarded Rossetti is a very remarkable thing. It 
extended to the smallest details. When they were 
furnishing rooms, the approval of Eossetti was anxiously 
awaited. Burne-Jones wrote : " Rossetti came. This 
was always a terrifying moment to the very last. He 
laughed, but approved." 

It is difficult to estimate the secret of this extra- 
ordinary magnetism, which seems almost hypnotic. 
It was due to the virile independence of Eossetti's 
character, the determination with which he pursued 
his own aims, his absolute intellectual indifference, 
though combined with an acute sensitiveness, to the 
value of the opinions of others. Then, too, his per- 
formances were in the highest degree stimulating. He 
seemed, as it were, to be in the possession of the inner- 
most and most magical secrets of art. Moreover, he 
was possessed of a matchless and irresistible eloquence : 
he did not monopolise the conversation, but his sayings 
were incisive, fascinating, humorous, and suggestive. 
At the same time, he displayed a magnificent generosity 
to the claims of others, and was entirely devoid of 
any pettiness or envy. No doubt, too, his manner 
had in those days an irresistible charm : he was 
tender, genial, and sympathetic. He was apparently 
unaware of the influence he exerted, and used no arts 
to gain or maintain it. It is not to be wondered at 
that the two fell completely under the spell. 

Burne-Jones remained a faithful friend and ally 



11.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 41 

through life, and was one of the few who were ad- 
mitted into the inmost circle in the days when from 
various causes it was narrowing. With William Morris 
for a long time the association was even closer. Ros- 
setti was a frequent guest in his house at Upton, and 
was for a time joint-tenant of Kelmscott with him. 
In Eossetti's later years they seldom met ; but 
though in a sense estranged, there was no definite 
rupture of relations ; a contributing cause being that 
Morris was a very busy man, and when in London 
could find little leisure for anything. Another friend 
of the same date was Mr. Swinburne, who was for a 
time an inmate of Eossetti's house, and remained a 
close friend. 

From 1870 onwards the diminished intercourse with 
certain older friends was in a measure compensated 
for by the devotion of several enthusiastic young men 
of a later generation, who regarded the friendship 
of Eossetti as an inestimable privilege. Such were 
Walter Pater, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, and Philip 
Bourke Marston, Mr. Fairfax Murray and Mr. Gosse. 
The relations of Eossetti to these young men were 
particularly delightful; he was tenderly paternal in 
his interest in their work, and spared no pains in help- 
ing and advising them. He inspired in them a loyalty 
and an affection which knew no bounds, and to these 
late-comers he probably showed less of the capricious 
side of his character than to his older associates. But 
after 1877 these friendships, like the earlier ones, felt 
the overshadowing effects of the darker mood which 
invaded Eossetti's spirit. 

The history of the firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner 
and Company, afterwards Morris and Company, in 



42 KOSSETTI [chap. 

which Rossetti was a partner, demands a few words. 
It was started in 1861 as a non-limited concern. 
There were eight original holders, Madox Brown, 
Eossetti, Webb, Burne-Jones, and Arthur Hughes 
being the members whose names did not appear. Mr. 
Hughes withdrew almost at once. Both the inception 
of the scheme and its original form seem to have been 
largely due to Rossetti. The members contributed in 
all £20 each, the rest of the capital being supplied by 
Morris himself and his mother. The idea was that 
the members of the firm should be paid for whatever 
they designed, and this was faithfully carried out. 
There were no profits for some time, and later on, as 
the entire direction of the firm fell into the hands of 
Morris, the tardy profits also passed into his hands. 
The difficulties of the firm were mainly caused by lack 
of capital. In 1874 it became clear that the business 
must be reorganised. The liabilities were unlimited ; 
Morris had embarked all his available capital in it, 
and devoted the whole of his time to the work. On 
the other hand, each original member had a legal claim 
to an equal share of the divisible assets of the firm. 

Burne-Jones became alarmed at the position of 
affairs, and, with Faulkner and Webb, withdrew; 
they refused to accept any consideration as partners. 
Madox Brown headed an opposition movement, and 
appears to have been joined — such at least was 
Morris's impression — by Rossetti and Marshall. A 
large sum of money was involved, as the business 
was beginning to prosper, the stock being valuable, 
and the goodwill constituting a considerable asset. 
The details are rather obscure. Mr. William Rossetti 
says that his brother was on the side of Burne-Jones, 



ir.] THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 43 

Webb, and Faulkner, and adopted a conciliatory atti- 
tude throughout, not desiring any personal compensa- 
tion. But the members of the opposition section 
received their due share of the estimated value of the 
assets and goodwill of the firm. Out of this, a sum of 
money was certainly assigned to Kossetti, which he 
laid apart for the eventual advantage of a member of 
the Morris family, but upon which, before his death, 
he had trenched to a considerable extent. 

It is said that Morris was much hurt at the behaviour 
of the dissentients. The success of the enterprise was 
wholly due to him. But it must be in justice admitted 
that the whole arrangement was a thoroughly un- 
businesslike one, and that if the firm had failed, as it 
was at one time in considerable danger of doing, the 
others would have been liable to share the pecuniary 
loss. Madox Brown seems to have always calculated 
on the profits being eventually an important addition 
to his earnings ; and viewing the matter from a busi- 
ness point of view, it is clear that Morris, as soon as 
he assumed the direction of the firm, ought to have 
bought out the other partners. It was hardly equi- 
table that they should have continued to be liable 
during the earlier years of the firm's existence in the 
case of possible and indeed probable disaster, and then 
should have been expected to retire without compen- 
sation as soon as the business began to prosper. The 
result of the winding-up was certainly to bring about 
strained relations between Morris and Rossetti, but as 
far as feeling went, the rupture was not permanent, 
though for other reasons the two met no more upon 
the old footing. 



CHAPTER III 

LATER LIFE 

Into whatever byways of passion Eossetti may after- 
wards have strayed, it is certain that his earliest youth 
was singularly pure. He had no leisure to think of 
love. It is strange that one whose intellect reached 
its maturity so early, and in whose conceptions of life 
Love actual and idealised was to play so unique a part, 
should have been, on the threshold of manhood, so 
virginal and even cold in disposition. Probably the 
intense preoccupation with intellectual and artistic 
things, combined with the enthusiasm of equal friend- 
ship, left but little scope for the approaches of passion. 
But in 1850 the star of Eossetti' s life rose suddenly 
into the clear heaven. 

In that or the previous year W. H. Deverell, a 
young painter, a genial, brilliant, and romantically 
handsome young man, doomed to an early death, saw 
in a bonnet-shop near Leicester Square, working with 
her needle, a tall dignified girl of extraordinary beauty, 
with a brilliant complexion, pale-blue eyes, and a mass 
of coppery-golden hair. " She had the look of one," 
said Madame Belloc, " who read her Bible and said her 
prayers every night, which she probably did." She 
speaks also of " an unworldly simplicity and purity 

44 



CFiAP. III.] LATER LIFE 45 

of aspect." Deverell through his mother made 
inquiries as to the possibility of having sittings 
from the girl, and painted a picture called " The 
Duke with Viola (Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) lis- 
tening to the Court Minstrels." In this picture 
Kossetti sat for the head of the Jester, the girl her- 
self appearing as Viola. This strange juxtaposition 
of two persons whose lives were to be so deeply inter- 
mingled is notable. She was then hardly seventeen, 
her name -Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, daughter of a 
retired Sheffield tradesman. She afterwards sat to 
Holman Hunt for Sylvia in the picture from The Two 
Gentlemen of Verona, and to Millais for his Ophelia. 

Kossetti fell at once deeply in love with this quiet 
self-possessed girl ; and an engagement was formed 
between them in 1851. Head after head in Kossetti's 
pictures, besides innumerable sketches, give us a very 
distinct idea of her extraordinary charm. A portrait 
done by herself in 1853 is not so attractive ; the 
heavy-lidded, somewhat melancholy eyes and the full 
lips held somewhat primly together have very little 
of the charm with which Rossetti invested the face. 
She seems to have had but little education, except 
what she had acquired for herself ; but though thus 
untaught, and ignorant of many things, she seems to 
have had a real nobility of spirit, and to have borne 
herself with dignity and sweetness; but she held, as 
it were, a certain shield of reserve between herself and 
the world. She allowed few to "suspect what she was 
— serious, courageous, patient, and loving. She spoke 
invariably in a dry and humorous vein, neither frivo- 
lous nor light, but impenetrable, as though, like St. 
Francis of Assisi, she said Secretum meum mihi — my 



46 ROSSETTI [chap. 

secret is my own. She was artistically gifted, and had 
a considerable faculty of poetical invention which is 
traceable in her drawings ; and though the impress of 
Rossetti's mind and taste is everywhere visible in those 
pathetic designs, it seems that her own methods to a 
certain extent affected the character of his work. Mr. 
Swinburne, defending her from what has been con- 
strued into an aspersion upon her in Mr. W. Bell Scott's 
autobiographical notes, with characteristic generosity 
says : " It is impossible that even the reptile rancour, 
the omnivorous malignity, of lago himself, could have 
dreamed of trying to cast a slur on the memory of 
that incomparable lady whose maiden name was Sid- 
dal and whose married name was Rossetti." In 1853 
traces of a consumptive tendency became apparent, 
and from that time to the tragic end of her life it was 
one prolonged struggle with mortal illness. 
Rossetti wrote of her in 1854 : — 

" It seems hard to me when I look at her sometimes, work- 
ing or too ill to work, and think how many without one 
tithe of her genius or greatness of spirit have granted them 
abundant health and opportunity to labour through the little 
they can do or will do, while perhaps her soul is never to 
bloom nor her bright hair to fade, but after hardly escaping 
from degradation and corruption, all she might have been 
must sink out again unprofitably in that dark house where 
she was born. How truly she may say, ' No man cared for 
my soul.' " 

In 1854, when Rossetti became acquainted with 
Ruskin, Miss Siddal Avas introduced to the latter, 
and showed him her designs. Ruskin thought her a 
"noble glorious creature," and made a suggestion 
which illustrates his chivalrous generosity, that he 
should settle upon her an annual ^150, taking in 



III.] LATER LIFE 47 

exchange all the work she did up to that value. 
Of this arrangement Ruskin wrote : *' The chief 
pleasure I could have about it now would be her 
simply accepting it as she would have accepted 
a glass of water when she was thirsty, and never 
thinking of it any more." In 1855 she consulted 
Dr. Acland of Oxford, who said that her illness 
originated in " mental power long pent up, and 
lately overtaxed." She went abroad for a time 
and returned no better. The engagement dragged 
on, Rossetti's finances being still unable to justify 
marriage, though he was often in her company, even 
travelling with her in an entirely unconventional 
brotherly way. It must be confessed that the position 
was one of great strain. Rossetti, as may easily be 
supposed, was often acutely jealous, even of his nearest 
and dearest friends, and avenged any imaginary slight 
offered to Miss Siddal with extreme displeasure. But 
in 1860 Rossetti was in easier circumstances, and 
went with Miss Siddal, then in an extremely delicate 
condition, to Hastings, where they were married on 
May 23rd. 

They went for a short tour to Paris. It is an 
inexplicable thing, especially in a man of profoundly 
superstitious nature, that Rossetti should on his 
marriage-tour have completed from an early design 
one of his most impressive drawings, " How they met 
Themselves," where a lover and his lady, the latter 
drawn from Miss Siddal, are confronted in a dark 
woodland by the wraiths of themselves, a presage of 
death. There is a breathless horror about the picture 
in its completed form which testifies to the strength of 
the mood which originated it. 



48 ROSSETTI [chap. 

They returned to 14 Chatham Place, some additional 
rooms being taken in from the adjoining house. 
Rossetti was now thirty-two, and his habits, rendered 
inevitable by the characteristic independence of his 
temperament, were eminently ill-suited for domesticity. 
He kept what hours he liked, painted when he felt in- 
clined, disliked all questions of economical arrange- 
ment, eschewed all ordinary social observances, dashed 
into restaurants for meals, rather than submit to any 
domestic routine ; he did not attempt to accommodate 
himself to others, as indeed he had little practice in 
doing, from the absolute command he had always 
exercised, down to the smallest details, of the circle in 
which'he lived. At the same time they undoubtedly 
enjoyed a great if somewhat fluctuating happiness. 
Rossetti was working very hard owing to an un- 
fortunate event which had taken place in 1860. A 
Mr. Flint, a nonconformist stockbroker of Leeds, a 
great admirer of his paintings and one of the most 
liberal purchasers, died suddenly. He had advanced 
over £700 to Rossetti on commissions, and the money 
had flowed out of Rossetti's improvident hands. It 
was necessary to complete the pictures for the benefit 
of Mr. Flint's estate, or refund the purchase-money. 
Rossetti did something of both, and had at the same 
time to work hard to support his wife and himself. 
But he managed simultaneously to bring out the 
Early Italian Poets, Ruskin guaranteeing a sum of 
money to the publishers. Moreover, it was at this 
time that the Morris firm was constituted, it is thought 
on Rossetti's suggestion. All this shows under what 
high pressure he was living. In 1861 Mrs. Rossetti 
was delivered of a still-born female child, and from 



III.] LATER LIFE 49 

that time her health tragically declined. She suffered 
acutely from neuralgia, and in the later portraits the 
languor and shadow of death are only too sadly 
evident. In February 1862 she dined with her hus- 
band at a restaurant in Leicester Square. They went 
back home, and as she appeared to be tired and in 
pain, he advised her to go to bed; he himself went 
out to a drawing-class at the Working Men's College. 
Coming back late he found her unconscious; she had 
been in the habit, under medical orders, of taking 
laudanum, and she had miscalculated the dose. Four 
doctors were summoned, and all was done that could 
be done. Rossetti, in the course of the ghastly attempts 
to resuscitate her, went out distractedly to call on 
Ford Madox Brown at five in the morning: Mrs. 
Eossetti died an hour or two afterwards. The finding 
of the coroner's jury was ''Accidental Death." Mrs. 
Rossetti could hardly have hoped that her life, con- 
sidering her state of health, could have been much 
prolonged; but it is worse than useless to attempt to 
speculate as to whether there was any motive in her 
mind that might have prompted her to self-destruction. 
It is impossible to resist the feeling that it was an 
imperfect partnership — impar congressus. There was 
a certain difference of social standing, to begin with; 
then, though in mental power and artistic tastes there 
was a strong similarity between the pair, yet Miss 
Siddal's lack of formal cultivation put her at a dis- 
advantage in dealing with a mind so impatient of any 
imperfection of intellectual sympathy as Rossetti's. 
Again, Miss Siddal's simple religious beliefs were ill- 
fitted to match with Rossetti's sceptical habit of mind; 
and lastly, though she was deeply and passionately 



50 ROSSETTI [chap. 

attached to him, yet the long engagement was a strain 
on both ; and it was moreover a time of sad entangle- 
ment for Rossetti, whose sensuous nature gained a 
firmer hold on him as he grew older. Into the details 
of Rossetti's wayward impulses it is unnecessary to go; 
but the jealous hunger of the heart, which is the 
shadow of devoted love, gave Mrs. Rossetti much 
cause for unhappiness ; and it is enough to say that 
Rossetti's conscience-stricken condition at his wife's 
death was based on the knowledge that he had not 
failed to wound a faithful heart. 

Rossetti's demeanour at the inquest and during 
the sad days before the funeral was extraordinarily 
courageous and dignified. Just before the coffin was 
closed he left the room in which some friends were 
assembled, taking with him a manuscript book of 
poems, and placed it between the cheek and the hair 
of his dead wife. He then came back and said what 
he had done, adding that they had often been written 
when she was suffering and when he might have been 
attending to her, and that the solitary text of them 
should go with her to the grave. It seems that Ford 
Madox Brown, who was present, thought that this 
impulsive sacrifice was quixotic, but at such a moment 
remonstrance was impossible. Rossetti evidently meant 
it to be a punishment to himself for sacrificing the gen- 
tle tendance of love to ambitious dreams, and for even 
deeper failures of duty, and the volume was buried 
with his wife in Highgate cemetery that day. The 
tale of their sad recovery will hereafter be told; but 
the act has a tragic beauty when one considers what 
hopes Rossetti thus resigned; and it may be doubted 
whether in the annals of literature there is any 



HI.] LATER LIFE 51 

scene which strikes so vehement a note of sorrow 
and self-reproach — the abased penitence of a strong, 
contrite, and passionate soul. 

After the death of his wife Eossetti felt entirely 
unable to live any longer at Chatham Place, and 
eventually took a lease of a house in Chelsea, No. 16 
Cheyne Walk, called Tudor House, which is insepara- 
bly connected with his life and fame and tragic decline. 

It was a large house in what was then a very 
picturesque and secluded region. There was no em- 
bankment then, but all the long-shore bustle of boats 
and barges. It was an extensive, old-fashioned, com- 
fortable house — too big for a single tenant. There lay 
a great garden behind it, nearly an acre in extent, 
with limes and other trees, the thick foliage of which 
darkened the back windows. Rossetti had a roomy 
studio at the back, and a bedroom with a small break- 
fast-room attached. There was a dining-room, and a 
fine drawing-room on the first floor occupying the 
whole front of the house ; above were a number of 
bedrooms. Besides Rossetti there were at first three 
sub-tenants, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. George Meredith, 
and Mr. William Rossetti. The idea was to lead a 
kind of collegiate life : Mr. Swinburne and Mr. 
Meredith had their own sitting-rooms where they 
received their visitors, and it was understood that all 
in residence should dine together in the evenings. 
Mr. Meredith's tenancy did not continue very long; 
and indeed it required rather peculiar qualities to 
submit to the rule of a president such as Rossetti 
was. He was masterful, independent, full of strong 
prejudices strongly expressed. Though his enthusiasm 
and genius were great, yet his view both of art and 



52 EOSSETTI [chap. 

literature was narrowly circumscribed. Moreover, for 
an experiment of the kind to prove successful, a certain 
submissiveness with regard to habits, tastes, and hours, 
or at all events a considerable indifference to settled 
ways of life, must have been essential. Rossetti him- 
self kept what hours pleased him; he rose late, he 
took his meals when it suited him, he worked most of 
the day and went out when he chose, he sat up to 
unearthly hours of the night. It is true that he was 
aifectionate, generous, and lovable ; but he was not 
considerate in small things, and it is on that quality 
more than on any other that the harmony of domestic 
life depends. 

It has often been supposed that Eossetti after his 
wife's death fell into habits of morbid seclusion. This 
is an entire mistake. He suffered acutely, and from 
this time forward he was no longer a stranger to 
moods of great depression. But his vitality was then 
at its strongest; he worked hard at his painting, he 
read, he saw much of his particular friends. More- 
over, he may be said to have invented the modern 
taste for old furniture, china, and bric-di-brac of 
every kind. He became an industrious collector, 
rummaging old curiosity shoj)s and furniture shops 
in every direction, more for the love of the pursuit 
than for pleasure in what he collected ; he filled the 
great house with pictures, objects of art, china, and 
ancient furniture. He bought curious animals, which 
he kept in the garden : he possessed at one time or 
another a wombat, a woodchuck, an armadillo, a raccoon, 
a kangaroo, a deer, a chameleon, a salamander, and 
even a zebu, which last proved to be dangerous. The 
wombat used to sleep on the epergne in the middle of 



III.] LATEE LIFE 53 

the dinner-table, entirely indifferent to the talk, the 
movement, and the lights. On one occasion it took 
advantage of a particularly enthusiastic and absorbed 
discussion to descend from its place and gnaw the 
contents of a box of expensive cigars. 

Kossetti's professional income grew very rapidly ; in 
1865 he made over £2000, in 187G his income was nearly 
twice that amount, and he said that he regarded this as 
about his average. But though he had a strong business 
capacity, and made excellent bargains for his pictures, 
he was lavish of money, fond of gratifying every whim, 
and extremely generous ; so that he accumulated very 
little. He had a taste for wealth, but none for 
economy. There is a story of his being paid for a 
picture in notes, and keeping the roll in an unlocked 
drawer, taking out any sum he wanted. His servants 
caught the spirit of their master, and the house- 
keeping was of the most reckless description. He 
dabbled during these years in spiritualism, and was 
evidently haunted by a strong desire to prove if pos- 
sible the continuance of individuality after death. 

Occasionally he travelled to Belgium or France, but 
never left Great Britain after 1864. Perhaps it may 
be said that the earlier years of his life in Cheyne 
Walk were his happiest period ; he was able to live 
as he liked ; he found his fame and his wealth grow, 
without the need of modifying or sacrificing any of his 
idiosyncrasies. He saw those of his friends whom he 
desired to see, and he found himself full of artistic 
impulse, which he was able to embody as he desired. 

But the shadow began to fall. In 1867 insomnia began 
to afflict him, and his eyesight showed signs of failing. 
He was by temperament highly impatient of physical 



64 EOSSETTI [chap. 

suffering, and was, moreover, so entirely wrapped up 
in his work, that anything which threatened the suspen- 
sion of activity was an intolerable calamity. He had 
practically no recreations ; and though in many ways 
physically indolent, yet he was incapable of deliberate 
rest, and had no quiet, tranquil occupations in which 
he could take refuge. 

In 1868 he paid his first visit to Penkill Castle, 
Ayrshire, the home of Miss Alice Boyd, a gifted 
amateur artist whom he had known for some years. 
He returned in better health and spirits, though he 
said that his eyes still troubled him, and that he saw 
all objects that were not quite close to him with a veil 
interposed, which he described as being like curling 
smoke or effervescing champagne. He took to wearing 
strong glasses, which he never removed. In 1869 he 
revisited Penkill, and it now became clear that there 
was some definite nervous mischief at work. He 
often discussed the ethics of suicide, and was under 
the impression that he was visited by manifestations 
which proved that the spirit of his wife was near him. 
William Bell Scott, who was at Penkill at the time, 
gives a curious story of a walk which he took with 
Kossetti to a certain dark pool in a rocky glen near 
Penkill, when he believed that the prompting to self- 
destruction visited Rossetti's mind with a sudden insist- 
ence. Moreover, Eossetti found a chaffinch in the road 
to Girvan, which allowed itself to be picked up, handled, 
and carried home, and which he seems to have in 
some way connected with the spirit of his wife. But his 
intellect was extraordinarily vigorous. He wrote several 
poems, among them The Stream'' s Secret, one of his most 
musical and mystical lyrics, much of which he com- 



in.] LATER LIFE 56 

})Osed in a cave by the side of the brown, rushing Pen- 
whapple, near Penkill. He recollected and recovered 
by memory many of his early poems, the only copy of 
which was in his wife's grave. His friends had several 
times urged him to recover the ms.; Eossetti resisted, 
but at last, fretted by his inability to remember the 
poems, he yielded. The matter was arranged with the 
Home Secretary, Mr. Bruce, afterwards Lord Aberdare. 
One night, seven and a half years after the funeral, a 
fire was lit by the side of the grave, and the coflBn was 
raised and opened. The body is described as having 
been almost unchanged. Rossetti, alone and oppressed 
with self-reproachful thoughts, sat in a friend's house 
while the terrible task was done. The stained and 
mouldered manuscript was carefully dried and treated, 
and at last returned to his possession. He copied the 
poems out himself, and destroyed the volume. But 
it is impossible to resist a certain feeling of horror at 
the episode. Rossetti was not a man to have yielded 
tamely to the suggestions of friends in this or any 
other matter ; such grace as belonged to the original 
act was forfeited by the recovery of the book ; and 
there is a certain taint about the literary ambition 
which could thus violate the secrecy of the grave, 
however morbid the original sacrifice may have been. 

The poems were eventually published in 1870, and 
it is characteristic of Rossetti that he was careful to 
provide that the book should be reviewed, in promi- 
nent periodicals, by personal friends of his own, who 
should not err by want of sympathy with the author's 
treatment. Even William Morris went so far as to 
write, in the Academy, what was perhaps the only 
review of his life. 



56 ROSSETTI [chap. 

The book was received with a chorus of approval. 
Mr. Swinburue wrote a generous panegyric in the 
Fortnightly Review, and at first there was hardly a dis- 
sentient voice. Rossetti stepped at once into the front 
rank of contemporary poets. Seldom has there been a 
more easy and complete triumph. No doubt a certain 
mysterious prestige already surrounded the author. 
Very little was known about him ; his pictures were 
never exhibited, but commanded the admiration of 
the best connoisseurs. He was known, too, to be at 
the centre of a group of interesting and commanding 
personalities, and some reflection of the extraordinary 
homage which even then was paid him had reached 
the curious ears of the world. From this period may 
be said to date the inquisitive interest in the personal- 
ity of Rossetti, stimulated by the strange seclusion 
in which he lived; and from this period, too, date 
the curiously exaggerated legends that were circulated 
about him, of which it is enough here to say that the 
shadows were far darker than were in the least degree 
justified by the reality. Rossetti cannot be described 
as a man who submitted to current views of morality. 
He loved swiftly and almost unscrupulously ; but he 
was in no sense a profligate ; his faults were the faults 
of passion, not restrained by the ordinary social code. 

But the strangest irony of all is that the man who 
most unaffectedly desired seclusion, and the faUentis 
semita vitce, who abhorred publicity, and compliments, 
and distinguished consideration, who desired only to 
live his own life and dream out his own dreams, should 
have been subjected to so close and inquisitive a curi- 
osity that it has proved necessary, in order to preserve 
his memory unstained, to present a closer and more 



III.] LATER LIFE 57 

minute picture of his life and habits than has ever 
perhaps been given to the world of a great personality. 
It was not that he courted curiosity, as some have done, 
by denying himself to the general gaze. He had no 
designs on the admiration or compassion of the world ; 
as long as he could live as he desired, write and paint 
as he chose, and have the company of those whom he 
loved, he asked no more. This, indeed, in a sense he 
achieved ; but he could not achieve the lonely self- 
ordained life which was his deliberate choice. 

It is here necessary to say a few words on one of 
the dark shadows of Rossetti's life — his chloral habit, 
which began about 1870. Rossetti's unhappy misuse 
of chloral is generally and radically misrepresented. 
He is spoken of as the victim of a vicious indulgence 
which he had not the strength to give up. Of course 
it cannot be defended ; his happiness was wrecked by 
it, for chloral was no doubt the main cause of the sad 
delusions that overclouded his later years, and it, more- 
over, undoubtedly shortened his life. But it must be 
remembered that his use of it was not to indulge a 
dangerous pleasure, or for the sensations which it gave 
him ; he took it primarily as a medicine for insomnia, 
in the unhappy belief that it was innocuous in its results 
and mechanical in its action. He no doubt at first, and 
evidently for a long time, thought of himself as a man 
who must choose between sleeplessness and a potent 
drug, and that as his livelihood and energies depended 
upon his getting some measure of sleep, there was no 
choice in the matter. Given the circumstances, com- 
bined with the elements of his character, self-will, 
impatience of suffering, and entire independence of 
opinion, there are all the materials for an inevitable 



58 ROSSETTI [chap, 

catastrophe. It is easy to say he ought to have sub- 
mitted himself to some strict medical regime, but that 
was exactly what Rossetti woiild not do, and it is not 
impossible that insomnia might have precipitated a still 
worse calamity. There is no doubt that he gradually 
became aware that he was becoming enslaved to the 
drug. What he said on the subject to Mr. Hall Caine 
shows that he knew, a year or two before the end, what 
havoc it was working on his life and constitution ; but 
by this time he had gone too far to draw back, except 
by submitting himself to a restraint which he was 
the last person in the world to accept. Nothing can 
make it less of a tragedy than it was. It is simply 
horrible to see one so robust, active, and enthusiastic 
going slowly down the dark descent with clouded 
brain and saddened brow ; but it is the case of a man 
confronted in his own thought with a disastrous cessa- 
tion of the energies upon which his life was built; 
finding to his intense satisfaction a simple and effectual 
relief, and then becoming aware that that very specific 
is taking a fatal hold on him. But there was no 
conscious sense of degradation connected with it. He 
wrote and spoke freely to his friends and relations of 
his attempt to reduce the drug, as a man who finds the 
treatment of an ailment becoming in itself dangerous. 
As he wrote to Ford Madox Brown in 1877: "The 
fact is, that any man in my case must either do as I do, 
or cease from necessary occupation, which cannot be pur- 
sued in the day when the night is stripped of its rest." 
I imagine that it was on the medical aspect of the 
case that his mind mainly dwelt. The delusions of 
spirit, the weakness of will, the fear of contact with 
the world were not by himself attributed to chloral ; 



III.] LATER LIFE 50 

his insane terror of the conspiracy which he believed 
existed to decry and to defame him was to him a real 
and objective thing. If he had found his intellectual 
powers weakened, and his artistic skill directly dimin- 
ished by the drug, I believe he would have been far 
more ready to acquiesce in measures to break off the 
use of it ; but I do not imagine that he himself, until 
near the end, thought the chloral responsible for his 
failing constitution ; and it seems that when his medi- 
cal adviser determined that at all hazards the habit 
must be broken, he did not refuse his consent. 

It is therefore a complicated sitiiation ; and it is not 
swiftly and sternly to be dismissed as a case of perni- 
cious and deliberate indulgence in a base form of pleas- 
ure. It is not primarily a question of morals, but a case 
of reckless imprudence in adopting, apart from medical 
advice, a specific which had such fatal consequences. 

In 1871 Rossetti became joint-tenant with William 
Morris of Kelmscott Manor-House, in Oxfordshire, near 
Lechlade, and close to the Thames. He introduced 
a picture of the house in the background of Water 
WiUoiv. It is a large, ancient, pearly-grey building 
of rubble-stone, ''buttered over " with plaster, the stones 
showing through ; many-gabled, mullioned, stone-slated, 
extraordinarily unspoilt, with farm buildings all about 
it. It had a beautiful garden with fine yew hedges, 
and stood near an old-world hamlet. The landscape 
has all the charm of a secluded river-valley. "William 
Morris loved the place passionately; but Rossetti, 
though alive to the dreamy charm of the scene, was 
not at heart a lover of the homely beauty of the earth. 
To him the smallest touch of human beauty had more 
significance than the noblest natural prospect. 



60 ROSSETTI [chap. 

Rossetti was at Kelmscott during the summer and 
autumn of 1871, again in the winter of 1872-3, and 
for the greater part of the following twelve months. 
He had written to Madox Brown from Kelmscott in 
1869 : — " One might settle down into complete and 
most satisfactory habits of work here. There are two 
splendid riverside walks to be taken alternately every 
day, without a soul to be seen on the road to disturb 
the cud of composition, and at home everything lends 
itself to poetic composition." There is a big upper 
room at Kelmscott hung with tapestry representing 
the story of Samson. Here Eossetti worked, though 
he was much fretted by the insistence of the design. 
In the summer of 1874 he finally left it, and Morris 
continued to occupy it alone. The association of these 
two great names with the house will always give it a 
special sanctity. 

But he was not an easy inmate. A friend visiting 
him at Kelmscott in 1874 found him dining at 10 p.m., 
and not going to bed till four or five in the morning. 
His health was bad, and he was much beset by morbid 
delusions and suspicion of harmless persons. More- 
over, he thought that the isolated position of the place 
was ill-adapted for making professional arrangements 
for disposing of his pictures. The immediate cause of 
his departure was a strange quarrel with some anglers, 
who, he morbidly thought, had insulted him on purpose. 

It was a relief to Morris when Rossetti abandoned 
Kelmscott. From the first almost he had been " un- 
romantically discontented " with it : " he has all sorts 
of ways so unsympathetic with the sweet simple old 
place that I feel his presence there as a kind of slur 
on it." 



in.] LATER LIFE 61 

In some ways the family life there had been happy 
enough. Eossetti was devoted to the Morrises and 
their children, who found him a delightful playmate. 
But where he loved, he loved jealously and passionately, 
and the situation was an uneasy one. It may be added 
that the great friendship of Rossetti's life dates from 
this period. Mr. Theodore Watts, now Watts-Dunton, 
a man of letters, a poet, a novelist, and a critic, made 
Rossetti's acquaintance over a legal matter, and to the 
end of his life was his most devoted friend. It would 
be impossible to exaggerate the value of his friend- 
ship for Rossetti. Mr. Watts-Dunton understood him, 
sympathised with him, and with self-denying and un- 
obtrusive delicacy shielded him, so far as any one can 
be shielded, from the rough contact of the world. It 
was for a long time hoped that Mr. Watts-Dunton 
would give the memoir of his great friend to the world, 
but there is such a thing as knowing a man too well 
to be his biographer. It is, however, an open secret 
that a vivid sketch of Rossetti's personality has been 
given to the world in Mr. Watts-Dunton's well-known 
romance Ayhvin, where the artist Darcy is drawn from 
Eossetti. 

But it is now necessary to turn to an incident of the 
year 1871 which was fruitful in disaster for Rossetti. 
In the Contemporary Review for October 1871 appeared 
an article, afterwards expanded into a pamphlet, 
entitled " The Fleshly School of Poetry — Mr. D. G. 
Eossetti." The article was signed Thomas Maitland, 
and was written by the poet recently deceased, Robert 
Buchanan. The morality of this device has been 
impugned, and it is true that a personal attack of 
this character should have been anonymous rather 



62 EOSSETTI [chap. 

than pseudonymous. Into all the stages of the painful 
affair it is not necessary to go. At first Rossetti did 
not appear to be particularly disturbed by the attack. 
He wrote a very temperate reply under the title of 
The Stealthy School of Criticism, portions of which 
appeared in the Athenceum over his signature. But 
Buchanan was not content, and early in 1872 he 
issued his article expanded into a pamphlet, in a far 
more extended and denunciatory form. 

The Fleshly School of Poetry was a strong, coarse 
onslaught, grossly unjust and intolerably vehement, 
but gaining in venom and power to wound from 
the fact that it was an attack made in the shape 
of a defence of public morality. No doubt the defence 
was prompted by sincere motives ; but both the furtive 
method employed, and the careless injustice by which 
Eossetti was selected as a typical example of the 
decadent school, were inexcusable. The attack was 
pointed by quotation ; but by carefully selected quota- 
tions it would be as easy or easier to prove both 
Shakespeare and Milton to be vile and shameless 
poets, undermining the foundations of morality. The 
whole tone and spirit of Rossetti's poems are mis- 
represented. It is true that there breaks out in places 
a certain voluptuousness of phrase and image, but the 
fault is rather one of taste, in speaking without disguise 
of things more wisely left to men's memories and hearts, 
but not in themselves either unnatural or debasing ; of 
recounting things which, as Horace says, are sacro 
digna silentio. Indeed, it is too strong to say taste; it 
should rather be English taste ; and it must be kept 
in mind that Rossetti was by instinct an Italian, and 
that though he was deeply versed in English literature, 



III.] LATER LIFE 63 

and a master of English speech, one can never think 
of him as a purely English poet ; he never learned to 
look at things from an English point of view. The 
Englishman's idea of love-making is of a secretive 
order, and just as, in conversation, a sturdy silence, 
for instance, about religious things, is not inconsistent 
with a deep religious devotion, so the experiences of 
love are to an Englishman more suited for memory 
and recollection and seclusion, not sub divum rapienda, 
though the ardours of passion may be deeply felt and 
regarded as a very high and holy mystery of sweetness. 
Possibly the instinct may be wrong, and Englishmen 
would not lose in self-respect by a greater candour 
about the deeper experiences of life. But it is a 
national instinct for all that, and not to be lightly 
defied. In any case, the harm was done. There were 
innumerable people who agreed with the spirit of 
Buchanan's attack, who never endeavoured to verify 
for themselves the truth of his accusation, nor heeded 
his recantation. For Buchanan, writing to Mr. Hall 
Caine after Kossetti's death, said : " I was unjust, as I 
have said ; most unjust when I impugned the purity 
and misconceived the passion of writings too hurriedly 
read and reviewed currente calamo; ... I make full 
admission of Eossetti's claims to the purest kind of 
literary renown." Yet the result is now that a certain 
cloud hangs, in popular opinion, over Eossetti's writ- 
ings ; and the immediate effect upon himself was to 
cause him deep pain, to unsettle his sensitive mind, 
and to contribute in no small measure to the disaster 
of his later life. 

The charges, if they were true, were sufficient to 
create a deep suspicion of Eossetti among virtuous 



64 ROSSETTI [chap. 

and respectable people. What passed in Eossetti's 
thoughts cannot be known; but his brother dis- 
covered, on visiting him in June 1872, that his mind 
was unhinged. He became the victim of a delusion, 
from which he never entirely recovered, that there 
was a widespread and carefully organised conspiracy 
on foot against him to hound him out of society ; the 
smallest things fed this unnatural idea. He received 
a presentation copy of Fifine at the Fair from Robert 
Browning, fastened upon some lines at the end as 
a veiled attack upon himself, and at once expunged 
Browning from the number of his friends. He 
believed that Lewis Carroll's jeu cVesprit, The Hunting 
of the Snark, was a satire upon himself. Medical 
advice was summoned, and Rossetti consented to 
go to the house of a friend. Dr. Hake. Here he 
swallowed the contents of a phial of laudanum that 
he took with him, and his life was with difficulty 
preserved. He was, on recovery from the poison, 
discovered to be afflicted with partial paralysis of the 
leg. He was finally removed to Scotland, his friends 
rallying round him in a way which testifies to the 
wonderful loyalty which he inspired. He spent some 
time in Perthshire, at Urrard and Stobhall, two houses 
belonging to Mr. William Graham, M.P., the purchaser 
of many of his pictures. He was then moved to 
Trowan, near Crieff, where he made a rapid recovery, 
and resumed his painting. He continued, however, 
to take chloral. To meet his immediate necessities 
his great collection of china was sold, producing a 
large sum of money ; and towards the end of Sep- 
tember 1872 he was well enough to go down to 
Kelmscott, where he recovered to a great degree his 



III.] LATER LIFE 65 

spirits and energy. He wrote to his brother, Sep- 
tember 25, 1872 : " The pleasant peaceful hours at 
Euston Square yesterday were the first happy ones I 
have passed for months ; and here all is happiness 
again, and I feel completely myself." But his 
delusions never wholly left him. 

After leaving Kelmscott, as has already been re- 
lated, he returned to Cheyne Walk, and resumed his 
usual habits of life and work. In 1875 he took a 
house for a time at Bognor, called Aldwick Lodge, 
and then went for a while to Broadlands, the hospitable 
house of Lord Mount Temple. 

But his painful hallucinations continued to beset him. 
Whether he was tricked by his own fancy, or merely 
misinterpreted ordinary sounds, is not clear, but he 
was often under the impression that cabmen and other 
strangers insulted hira ; airy voices taunted him with 
epithets of intolerable ignominy ; even a thrush which 
sang insistently in his garden was believed by him to 
have been trained to ejaculate terms of obloquy to 
annoy him. Yet his intellectual vigour was absolutely 
Tindimmed ; his conversation, when he could keep off 
the dangerous subject, was still vigorous, fascinating, 
and stimulating. He painted as deftly and sugges- 
tively as ever, and wrote with the same entire command 
of forcible and beautiful English. 

In 1877, after a severe and painful attack of illness, 
from a complaint to which he was subject, he went 
down to a little place called Hunter's Forestall, in 
Heme Bay, and here he gave way to deep depression, 
imagining that he would no longer be able to design 
or paint. But his wonderful vitality again came to 
his assistance, and he returned to town with renewed 



66 EOSSETTI [chap. 

energies. Yet all this time he was gradually increas- 
ing the doses of chloral, and took a certain ghastly 
pride in the amount he could consume. The shadow 
darkened and deepened. In 1879, a friendship with 
Mr. Hall Caine brought for a time a little light into 
his life. Mr. Hall Caine's Recollections of Rossetti is 
one of the most interesting and fascinating pieces of 
literary biography of modern times. Eossetti showed 
himself to him on terms of unguarded and brotherly 
intimacy, and Mr. Caine's book depicts the closing 
scenes of a memorable life in a way that, with all its 
wealth of detail, is never anything but dignified and 
stately. In July 1881, Mr. Caine became a regular 
inmate of the house, a position involving great strain, 
very loyally borne. 

In the early part of that year, Eossetti was preparing 
a new issue of his 1870 Poems, adding the work that 
had since accumulated. He ultimately divided the 
material into two volumes. Ballads and Sonnets, and 
Poems, both of which were issued at the end of 1881. 
In Ballads and Sonnets appeared Rose Mary, The Wliite 
Ship, and The King's Tragedy, the completed House of 
Life, and certain other new lyrics and sonnets. Into the 
revised Poems some fresh work was introduced, notably 
the unfinished early poem, TJie Bride's Prelude. The 
reception of these volumes was uniformly respectful, 
and even enthusiastic ; but no evidence of cordial 
admiration could give Eossetti, in his failing state, 
any increase of cheerfulness or satisfaction. 

I may here quote two or three of Mr. Hall Caine's 
reminiscences : — 

" I should have described Rossetti, at this time, as a man 
who looked quite ten years older than his actual age, which 



III.] LATER LIFE 67 

was fifty-two, of full middle height and inclining to corpu- 
lence, with a round face that ought, one thought, to be ruddy 
but was pale, large grey eyes with a steady introspecting look, 
surmounted by broad protrusive brows and a clearly-pencilled 
ridge over the nose, which was well cut and had large breath- 
ing nostrils. The mouth and chin were hidden beneath a 
heavy moustache and abundant beard, which grew up to the 
ears, and had been of a mixed black-brown and auburn, and 
were now streaked with grey. The forehead was large, round, 
without protuberances, and very gently receding to where thin 
black curls, that had once been redundant, began to tumble 
down to the ears. The entire configuration of the head and 
face seemed to me singularly noble, and from the eyes upwards, 
full of beauty. He wore a pair of spectacles, and, in reading, 
a second pair over the first : but these took little from the 
sense of power conveyed by those steady eyes, and that ' bar 
of Michael Angelo.' His dress was not conspicuous, being 
however rather negligent than otherwise, and noticeable, if 
at all, only for a straight sack-coat buttoned at the throat, 
descending at least to the knees, and having large pockets 
cut into it perpendicularly at the sides. This garment was, 
I afterwai'ds found, one of the articles of various kinds made 
to the author's own design. When he spoke, even in exchang- 
ing the preliminary courtesies of an opening conversation, I 
thought his voice the richest I had ever known any one to 
possess. It was a full deep baritone, capable of easy modula- 
tion, and with under-tones of infinite softness and sweetness, 
yet, as I afterwards found, with almost illimitable compass, 
and with every gradation of tone at command, for the recita- 
tion or reading of poetry. . . . 

" Dropping down on the sofa with his head laid low and his 
feet thrown up in a favourite attitude on the back, which 
must, I imagine, have been at least as easy as it was elegant, 
he began the conversation by bantering me upon what he 
called my ' robustious ' appearance compared with what he 
had been led to expect from gloomy reports of uncertain 
health. After a series of playful touches (all done in the 
easiest conceivable way, and conveying any impression on 
earth save the right one, that a first meeting with any man, 



68 ROSSETTI [chap. 

however young and harmless, was little less than a tragic 
event to Rossetti) he glanced one by one at certain of the 
topics that had arisen in the course of our correspondence. I 
perceived that he was a ready, fluent, and graceful talker, 
with a remarkable incisiveness of speech, and a trick of 
dignifying ordinary topics in words which, without rising 
above conversation, were so exactly, though freely enunciated, 
as vFould have admitted of their being reported exactly as 
they fell from his lips." 

The following is a memorable scene : — ■ 

" Before going into my room he suggested that I should go 
and look at his. It was entered from another and a smaller 
room which he said that he vised as a breakfast room. The 
outer room was made fairly bright and cheerful by a glitter- 
ing chandelier (the property once, he told me, of David 
Garrick), and from the rustle of trees against the window- 
pane one perceived that it overlooked the garden ; but the 
inner room was dark with heavy hangings around the walls as 
well as the bed, and thick velvet curtains before the windows, 
so that the candles in our hands seemed unable to light it, and 
our voices sounded thick and muffled. An enormous black 
oak chimney-piece of curious design, having an ivory crucifix 
on the largest of its ledges, covered a part of one side and 
reached to the ceiling. Cabinets, and the usual furniture of a 
bedroom, occupied places about the floor : and in the middle 
of it, and before a little couch, stood a small table on -which 
was a wire lantern containing a candle which Rossetti lit from 
the open one iir his hand — another candle meantime lying by 
its side. I remarked that he probably burned a light all 
night. He said that was so. 'My curse,' he add^^d, 'is 
insomnia. Two or three hours hence I shall get up and lie on 
the couch, and, to pass away a weary hour, read this book ' — 
a volume of Boswell's Johnson which I noticed he took out of 
the bookcase as we left the studio. It did not escape me that 
on the table stood two small bottles sealed and labelled, 
together with a little measuring-glass. Without looking 
further at it, but with a terrible suspicion growing over me, I 
asked if that were his medicine. 



III.] LATER LIFE 69 

" ' They say there is a skeleton in every cupboard,' he said 
in a low voice, ' and that's mine ; it is chloral.' 

" When I reached the room that I was to occupy during the 
night, 1 found it, like Rossetti's bedroom, heavy with hang- 
ings, and black with antique picture panels, with a ceiling 
(unlike that of the other rooms in the house), out of all 
reach or sight, and so dark from various causes that the 
candle seemed only to glimmer in it — indeed to add to the 
darkness by making it felt." 

In the following passage Mr. Caine describes his 
first sight of Kossetti : — 

" Very soon Rossetti came to me through the doorway in 
front, which proved to be the entrance to his studio. Holding 
forth both hands and crying ' Hulloa,' he gave me that cheery, 
hearty greeting which I came to recognise as his alone, per- 
haps, in warmth and unfailing geniality among all the men 
of our circle. It was Italian in its spontaneity, and yet it 
was English in its manly reserve, and I remember with much 
tenderness of feeling that never to the last (not even when 
sickness saddened him, or after an absence of a few days or 
even hours) did it fail him when meeting with those friends 
to whom to the last he was really attached." 

The following account of his conversation has great 
interest : — 

" A certain incisiveness of speech which distinguished his 
conversation, I confess myself scarcely able to convey more 
than a suggestion of ; as Mr. Watts has said in the Athenceum, 
his talk showed an incisiveness so perfect that it had often 
the pleasurable surprise of wit. Rossetti had both wit and 
humour, but these, during the time that I knew him, were 
only occasionally present in his conversation, while the inci- 
siveness was always conspicuous. A certain quiet play of 
sportive fancy, developing at intervals into banter, was some- 
times observable in his talk with the younger and more 
familiar of his acquaintances, but for the most part his con- 
versation was serious, and, during the time I knew him, often 



70 ROSSETTI [chap. 

sad. I speedily observed that he was not of the number of 
those who lead or sustain conversation. He required to be 
constantly interrogated, but as a negative talker, if I may so 
describe him, he was by much the best I had heard. Catch- 
ing one's drift before one had revealed it, and anticipating 
one's objections, he would go on from point to point, almost 
removing the necessity for more than occasional words. 
Nevertheless, as I say, he was not, in the conversations I 
have heard, a leading conversationalist; his talk was never 
more than talk, and in saying that it was uniformly sus- 
tained yet never declamatory, I think I convey an idea both 
of its merits and limitations." 

It is imijossible not to be struck by the fact that 
every one who has any personal recollection of Eossetti 
lays particular emphasis on the marvellous beauty of 
his voice and enunciation. Its wonderful resonance, 
its profound timbre, seem to have exercised a species 
of physical influence over his auditors. As Mr. Caine 
says, of his reading of Tlie White Ship: — 

" It seemed to me that I never heard anything at all match- 
able with Rossetti's elocution : his rich deep voice lent an 
added music to the music of the verse : it rose and fell in the 
passages descriptive of the wreck with something of the surge 
and sibilation of the sea itself ; in the tenderer passages it was 
soft as a woman's, and in the pathetic stanzas with which the 
ballad closes it was profoundly moving. Effective as the 
reading sounded in that studio, I remember at the moment to 
have doubted if it would prove quite so effective from a public 
platform. Perhaps there seemed to be so much insistence on 
the rhythm, and so prolonged a tension of the rhyme sounds, 
as would run the risk of a charge of monotony if falling on 
ears less concerned with points of metrical beauty than with 
fundamental substance. Personally, however, I found the 
reading in the very highest degree enjoyable and inspiring." 

In September 1881, Eossetti being much out of health 
and in great depression of mind, was induced to ac- 



III.] LATER LIFE 71 

company Mr. Hall Caine to a house in the Vale of 
St. John near Keswick, and regained some slight 
degree of physical activity. He even ascended a moun- 
tain in the neighbourhood ; but his dejection returned 
with redoubled force. His companion wrote : " At that 
time of the year the night closed in as early as seven 
or eight o'clock, and then in that little house among 
the solitary hills his disconsolate spirit would some- 
times sink beyond solace into irreclaimable depths of 
depression." They came back to Cheyne Walk in 
October, and Rossetti said with deep feeling, as he 
was helped across the threshold, now feebler than 
ever, "Thank God! home at last, and never shall I 
leave it again." The depression continued, and he 
became very anxious, though a pronounced agnostic, 
for confession and absolution. It was suggested to him 
that this was contrary to his pronounced views, to 
which he replied, " I don't care about that. I can 
make nothing of Christianity, but I only want a 
confessor to give me absolution for my sins ! " adding, 
" I believe in a future life. Have I not had evidence 
of that often enough? Have I not heard and seen 
those that died long years ago? What I want now 
is absolution for my sins, that's all ! " But he did not 
carry out his intention. 

He still worked on, without any marked diminution 
of technical skill. But the end was close at hand. 
He had a species of paralytic stroke in December 1881, 
and it was decided that the chloral must be summarily 
cut off. This was done under careful medical pre- 
cautions. After a short period of intense suffering he 
regained calmness of mind, and entire freedom from 
delusions. He recovered sufficiently to be able to 



72 EOSSETTI [chap. 

resume work, and even to call several times at his 
mother's house in Torrington Square; but a fatal 
illness that had long threatened him supervened. A 
friend lent him a bungalow at Birchington, and he 
went down there to try and regain strength. But he 
never really revived. At first he walked a little, and 
worked fitfully at his painting ; he wrote a grotesque 
ballad, Jan Van Hunks, vfhich has never been published, 
which he used to read aloud in the evenings with great 
amusement. He read novels and wrote a few letters. 
But the spring of life was broken, and his brother wrote 
in a diary that on April 1 he was " in a very prostrate 
condition physically, barely capable of tottering a 
few steps, half blind, and suffering a good deal of 
pain." On April 8, Saturday, he said to his brother, 
" I believe I shall die to-night," adding, " Yesterday I 
wished to die, but to-day I must confess that I do not." 
About 9.30 on the evening of Easter Sunday he was 
seized with convulsions and died in a few minutes, 
in the presence of his mother and sister, Mr. Watts- 
Dunton, and Mr. Caine. He was within a few weeks 
of completing his fifty-fourth year. 

He was buried quietly on April 14, 1882, at Birch- 
ington, where a cross has been erected over his grave. 

Eossetti was in appearance more Italian than English, 
though rather conveying an indefinable impression of 
foreign origin than displaying markedly foreign char- 
acteristics. He was of medium stature, not more 
than five feet eight inches; he was thin in youth, 
and in maturity decidedly stout. His complexion 
was clear and dark, his hair dark, silky, and abundant. 
There was a great depth and breadth of brow ; he had 



III.] LATER LIFE 73 

small ears, and white, delicate, -womanly hands. As a 
young man he wore only a moustache ; but after he 
was thirty he grew thin whiskers, and a rather strag- 
gling beard of a dark brown tint. 

But what made his face remarkable was the expres- 
sion. The full, blue-grey, wide-open eyes, in cavernous 
bistred sockets, the large, distended nostril, the loose 
under-lip wore a look that indicated fire, determina- 
tion, and energy. He walked rapidly and resolutely, 
though of a lounging and indolent habit indoors. 
There are several well-known portraits of him ; a 
youthful one (by himself), with abundant hair, has a 
certain look of Keats. When he grew his beard he 
resembled Hoccleve's miniature of Chaucer. He sat 
to P. M. Brown in 1851 for the head of Chaucer in 
the large picture of Chaucer reading to the Court of 
Edward III. the Legend of distance, and some have 
said that this is one of the best portraits of him. A 
portrait by Mr. G. F. Watts conveys the impression 
of incisiveness rather than strength. But the best 
known of all, which are acknowledged to be the most 
faithful likenesses, are two or more photographs taken 
by Downey in 1862. In one of these, — a full-face, — 
the heavy mouth, the sunken eyes, the deep indenta- 
tion above the nose, give a sort of bull-like look of 
strength ; while the wide nostril and the set serious- 
ness of the brow lend to the expression a dictatorial 
and peremptory look, a kind of soiva indignatio which 
is highly impressive. 

There is a picture, the original by Mr. Dunn, for 
some years Rossetti's assistant, of extraordinary inter- 
est and fidelity, which is reproduced in Mr. Watts- 
Dunton's Aylwin (4th edition, 1899), representing 



74 EOSSETTI [chap. 

Rossetti lounging in a chair in tlie green dining-room 
of the Cheyne Walk house, reading from a manu- 
script to Mr. Watts-Dunton, who sits on a sofa at his 
side. 

Rossetti has given several interesting particulars 
about his method of composition. He wrote easily in 
youth, but it was a long, deliberate, and exhausting 
process in his later days. He speaks in one of the 
Kelmscott letters of finding the lonely walks there 
favourable to composition, and at Penkill he wrote a 
good deal seated in the open air. He told a friend 
that his poetry took a great deal out of him. ''In 
that respect," he said, "I am the reverse of Swin- 
burne. For his method of production inspiration is 
indeed the word. With me the case is different. I 
lie on the couch, the racked and tortured medium, 
never permitted an instant's surcease of- agony until 
the thing on hand is finished." And again, he said 
of the composition of the King's Tragedy, " It was as 
though my life ebbed out with it." And of Rose Mary 
he said " that it had occupied three weeks in the 
writing, and that the physical prostration ensuing 
had been more than he would care to go tln-ough 
again." In 1881 he sent a sonnet to his sister, for his 
mother to read, adding, "With me, sonnets mean 
insomnia." But this strain seems to have been absent 
in earlier years. His early letters from abroad are full 
of poetry, some narrative, some lyrical ; and there is 
no hint that they cost him any particular effort, but 
rather came freely from an active mind, overflowing 
with zest for all beauty, whether of form or colour, 
word or phrase. 

It is interesting, however, to observe that his most 



III.] LATER LIFE 75 

mature work was thus carefully and fastidiously 
shaped. He left some prose sketches of intended 
poems, but they are the barest outline, as in the draft 
called The Orchard Pit, published in the Collected 
Works ; the detail and phrasing were left to the 
moment. He altered and retouched a good deal, but 
mostly in proof; he did not feel (and he was like 
Tennyson in this respect) that he really knew what 
was the worth and colour of a poem till he saw it in 
print. He submitted his poems a good deal to those 
of his intimates whose opinion he valued, but desired 
frank criticism more than suggestion. 

Rossetti was a great but not a wide reader; he 
read entirely for pleasure and not for information, as 
a relaxation and not as a pursuit. His tastes were 
purely literary ; he cared nothing for history, politics, 
or science. His knowledge of English poetry was very 
great in certain limited directions, and his memory 
for it was minute and accurate. He could quote large 
masses by heart. Yet he cared nothing for certain 
departments of literature, such as the Elizabethan 
dramatists. His tastes were eclectic, as may be 
imagined, and he had a keen eye for everything that 
bore the impress of strong individuality, for every- 
thing that was original, bizarre, unusual, grotesque, 
and peculiar. He was within certain limits a pene- 
trating and incisive critic, but with strong preferences 
and prejudices, and it was difficult to forecast what 
his judgment would be. There is an amusing story 
of William Morris sending him some proofs of Sigurd 
the Volsung, which Rossetti expressed himself unable 
to read. Morris pressed him for his reasons, and 
Rossetti said with languid indifference that he really 



76 ROSSETTI [chap. 

could not take any interest in a man whose parent 
was a snake. This petulant and perverse dictum from 
the author of Lilitli provoked Morris to vehement 
wrath, and he exploded in a gross personal retort. 
Though singularly independent in judgment, it is 
clear that, at all events in the later years of his life, 
Rossetti's taste was, unconsciously, considerably af- 
fected by the critical preferences of Mr. Watts-Dunton. 
I have heard it said by one who knew them both well 
that it was often enough for Mr. Watts-Dunton to 
express a strong opinion for Eossetti to adopt it as 
his own, even though he might have combated it for 
the moment. 

His admiration of Chatterton may be held to have 
been somewhat extravagant. Again, he always main- 
tained of Oliver Madox Brown, the gifted son of Ford 
Madox Brown, who died at the age of twenty, that 
his name would be a familiar one in English litera- 
ture. But allowing for these lesser deviations, the fact 
remains that Rossetti had a very masculine judgment 
and a profound critical insight. He was not, of course, 
in the technical sense of the word, a critic. It was 
rather a supreme power of divining what was forceful 
and beautiful that he possessed — 

" What is best 
He firmly lights upon, as birds on sprays." 

But he had little sense of comparison or systematic 
synthesis. His favourite writers seem to have been 
Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Shelley, whom he classed 
as the three great English imaginations. For Keats 
also he had an overpowering admiration, writing of 
him as " the one true heir of Shakespeare." He had 



III.] LATER LIFE 77 

studied the early English ballads in his youth very 
carefully, and remarked once that he had said to 
himself on realising their variety and majesty, "There 
lies your line." He had a great love of Milton's son- 
nets, but unduly underrated Wordsworth, Browning 
had at one time a great fascination for him. He spoke 
of Blake, Donne, and Tennyson Turner in terms of 
high praise. He was a constant student of Dante and 
the early Italian poets, and in Italian prose he was an 
admirer of Boccaccio. He was much attracted by the 
writings of E. A. Poe, both verse and prose. In Eng- 
lish prose he was a great reader of Boswell's Johnson 
and of Dickens ; but his favourite fiction was Dumas, 
of whom he possessed some hundred volumes. He 
had at one time carefully studied Swedenborg. He 
was fond of out-of-the-way literary biographies, such 
as Hogg's Shelley and Cottle's Coleridge. His library 
was mostly for use, and was collected on no plan. He 
possessed only about a thousand volumes : among these 
were a certain number of rare books and bibliographi- 
cal curiosities. He was a slow and careful reader, and 
much given to writing marginal annotations in his 
volumes. 



CHAPTER IV 

POEMS — CHARACTEBISTICS 

In the poetry of the nineteenth century it may be 
roughly said that two strains have chiefly predominated. 
The strongest impulse has perhaps been the impulse to 
annex philosophical speculation to poetry, to find a 
poetical solution for the problem lying behind nature 
and life, or to turn to account emotions of a philo- 
sophical kind. The other notable element has been the 
poetry of passion, of human relations and affections 
in their most direct forms. With neither of these had 
Eossetti any close affinity. Here again it is necessary 
to remind ourselves that he was not in any sense an 
Englishman, though he used the English language for 
his medium of expression. He belonged in reality to the 
mediaeval school of Italian poetry ; he was entirely un- 
affected by national problems, by the expansion of scien- 
tific and philosophical ideas. In an age which dealt 
largely with abstractions, he had no affinity with ab- 
stract thought. To him the emotions and the experience 
of life lay entirely in the intricate and complex devel- 
opment of human passion, the mysterious relations of 
human spirits ; but even here he did not approach the 
thought from its abstract side. For him human passion 
was inextricably connected with its outward manifesta- 



CHAP. IV.] POEMS — CHAEACTERISTICS 79 

tions, in tlie emotions stirred by the apprehension of 
beauty alike definite and indefinite, the gracious mys- 
teries of which human form and features, gesture, 
movement, and glance, seem a sacramental expression. 
This was not in Rossetti's case a purely material 
sentiment; all these outward lovelinesses seemed to 
him to hide a secret, to be the very voice of some 
remote spirit speaking instantly to the soul. 

As he wrote himself in the Athenceum, December 16, 
1871, of a certain sonnet in the House of Life, which 
had been chosen as t\e point d'appui of the most de- 
liberate attack ever made upon him: — "Any reader 
may bring any artistic charge he pleases against the 
above sonnet ; but one charge it would be impossible to 
maintain against the writer of the series in which it 
occurs, and that is, the wish on his part to assert that 
the body is greater than the soul. For here all the 
passionate and just delights of the body are declared — 
somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakably — 
to he as nought if not ennobled by the concurrence of the 
soul at all times." Or again, as he wrote in memorable 
words, embodying the innermost secret of his creed, of 
the type of beauty that he made his own — 

" Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought, 
Nor Love her body from her soul." 

That was Rossetti's message. The underlying truth is 
greater and more beautiful than any human expression 
of it ; but just as, under earthly limitations, a philo- 
sophical conception cannot exist apart from the words 
in which it is expressed, so to Rossetti the material 
expression of beauty was the only key to its mystery, 
and, for the present at least, indissolubly connected 
with it. 



80 ROSSETTI [chap. 

The soul then, in pursuit of this secret, must be alive 
to any hint that comes to it from the beauty of out- 
ward form. That was, then, the task of his life — the 
embodiment of mystical 2)cission} 

It was this strict limitation of Kossetti's emotion and 
thought that gave him his peculiar power. Nearly all 
his poems are the expression of some poignant passion ; 
his tragedies are the tragedies of blighted or broken 
love, and the blind recklessness that follows upon it. 
His view of nature is as a background, either of 
similarity or contrast, to the emotions which are being 
enacted in the foreground. Woods and hills are ac- 
cessories : even in such poems as The Stream's Secret, 
where the stream passes, as it were, through the fore- 
front of the dream, it is charged with the message and 
tidings of far-off love. The voice of the beloved is 
heard within the ripple, and the murmur of the water 
seems to be trying to convey to the listening brain 
some hint of passion. 

In his earlier days he seems to have held that 
painting had a possible future, while " English poetry 
was fast reaching the termination of its long and 
splendid career, and that Keats represented its final 
achievement." This theory he used to maintain with 
rhetorical force and vehement conviction. Speaking 
to Burne-Jones in the summer of 1857, he said, 
over and over again, " If any man has any poetry in 
him he should paint, for it has all been said and written 
and they have scarcely begun to paint it." 

At first poetry was to Eossetti but a recreation to be 
taken in the intervals of painting; but it gradually 

1 See T%e Truth about Bossetti, by Theodore Watts, Nine- 
teenth Century Bevieic, March 1883. 



IV.] POEMS — CHARACTERISTICS 81 

absorbed his mind, and he began to see that there was 
abundant room for it in the workl. Thus in 1871 we 
find him writing from Kelmscott to Ford Madox 
Brown : " I wish one could live by writing poetry. I 

think I'd see painting d d if I could." 

His theory of writing, as originally formed, was to 
find the most direct and unconventional expression 
possible for what had to be said. At the same 
time he had a strong feeling of the dignity of lan- 
guage requisite for poetry. As Mr. Hall Caine says : 
" Rossetti himself constantly urged that in prose 
the first necessity was that it should be direct, 
and he knew no reproach of poetry more damning than 
to say it was written in proseman's diction." He 
abhorred all intricacy of style, and held that absolute 
lucidity of expression was the first necessity. His 
constant emendations were directed, not always suc- 
cessfully, to the same end, to strengthen and clarify. 
In the earliest poems the result is a certain gauntness 
and stiffness of expression which is not without its 
charm, but is alien to his latest manner. Sometimes 
this precision of delineation carried him too far, as, for 
instance, in the stanza of which Coventry Patmore, 
speaking of the " fierce light of imagination " which 
Rossetti threw upon external things, wrote that it 
" seems scratched with an adamantine pen upon a slab 
of agate : — 

" ' But the sea stands spread 
As one wall with the flat skies, 
Where the lean black craft, like flies, 

Seem well-nigh stagnated, 

Soon to drop off dead.' " 

This stanza of Even So, obviously conceived under the 



82 EOSSETTI [chap. 

influence of Browning, finds its first sketch — by no 
means a rough one — in Rossetti's description in a 
letter of the " dense fogs of heat " at Hastings. 

" Emphasis and condensation," it is said, " were the 
characteristics of his muse." " I hate long poems," he 
often declared, and of Sydney Dobell he once impa- 
tiently enunciated, " What a pity it is that he insists 
on being generally so long-winded." Yet, as we shall 
have occasion to point out, he was not always true 
to this principle. He might emphasise and condense 
a particular stanza ; but there are poems like The 
Bride's Prelude, and Dante at Verona, where the mood 
is too much drawn out. 

Rossetti's poems, then, were based upon some clearly 
seen pictorial impression of a dramatic moment ; occa- 
sionally, for a longer poem, he made a prose sketch of 
the line he was intending to follow. But the actual 
creation of the visible form was absorbing, and de- 
manded all the powers of his mind. He would have 
differed toto coelo from the breezy maxims of William 
Morris, who said of writing poetry, " That talk of 
inspiration is sheer nonsense, I may tell you that flat ; 
there is no such thing : it is a mere matter of crafts- 
manship. ... If a chap can't compose an epic poem 
while he's weaving tapestry, he had better shut up, 
he'll never do any good at all." 

Walter Pater, in his essay in Ward's English Poets, 
makes what I believe to be a paradoxical criticism on 
Rossetti's poetry. He says that "his meaning was 
... in a certain sense learned and casuistical." I 
confess that I fail to catch hold of the clue that would 
lead me to this conclusion. In the ordinary sense of 
the word, casuistical implies a certain bewilderment in 



IV.] POEMS — CHARACTERISTICS 83 

the presence of the moral issues of action or thought ; 
and a casuist in art would be a man who found his 
idea of beauty complicated by a diflS-Culty in defining 
where the essence of beauty lay, whether Nature 
provided an ultimate test, whether moral excellence 
had any voice in the matter, whether human associa- 
tions could exercise a certain selection, and whether 
there were any absolute canons of beauty at all. 

Into these metaphysical regions I do not think that 
Rossetti entered. Strong as his sense of beauty was, 
it was not in the least a catholic sense. If a thing or 
a thought struck him as beautiful, beautiful it was to 
be; and I imagine that he was impervious both to 
suggestion and argument. His only preoccupation 
was to find due expression for what visited him in the 
form of an inspiration. 

The result of his experience in his art can be very 
plainly traced. He had two perfectly distinct manners. 
In his earlier period, when beauty of the world opened 
before him, he had both in his poetry and his pictures 
a sweet and exquisite na'iveti of phrase and concep- 
tion, that " first fine careless rapture " which gives the 
world, one is tempted to think, the best and most 
uplifting art, the art that springs from a pure natural 
joy, and uses words and colours with something of the 
bright insouciance of a child, unhampered by criticism 
and tradition alike. 

Then, as the years went on, and this natural fresh- 
ness became dimmed by sad experience, by mental and 
physical suffering, the growing strength of the crafts- 
man comes to his aid ; the earlier, simpler, more direct 
manner is discarded, and he begins to spin gorgeous 
word-textures, strange tapestries of language and 



84 ROSSETTI [chap. 

colour, which in his writings resulted in the construc- 
tion of what is literature rather than poetry. 

Rossetti was saved by his intensity of view and his 
firmness of conception from ever falling a victim to 
expression pure and simple. But setting a sonnet out 
of the House of Life, with its reverberating roll of 
sound, against such a delicate poem as The Portrait, or 
a picture of some ideal female head like the Astarte 
Syriaca, with all its dark jewellery of colour, against an 
early water-colour like Fazio's Mistress, one feels that, 
technical advance is not pure gain. Full to the brim 
as the later work is of all that art can do, it is like 
placing some gorgeous confection, to which a hundred 
strange exotic products have contributed their scents 
and savours, side by side with a branch plucked from 
some orchard tree, laden with virginal fruit, with the 
dew of the morning still globed upon it. 

The deep melancholy traceable in so many of the 
poems is inseparable from Rossetti's later view of life. 
The mystery of death, of separation, of the decay and 
vanishing of charm, of pain and sorrow, cutting in, so 
to speak, across the message of beauty, could not be 
shut out from his thoughts. To him such things were 
not pathetic; they did not hint at possibilities of 
restoration and future fulfilment. They seemed rather 
like a relentless tempest, sweeping from some evil and 
boding quarter, rending and wrecking the perfection, 
the sweetness, the loveliness of life. He did not probe 
deeper, and try to discover some formula which could 
harmonise and glorify the horror. He merely said, 
" Though the heart ache to contemplate it, it is there." 

Bossetti's use of words is an iateresting study. In 
his early poems he had a strong fancy for archaic 



IV.] POEMS — CHARACTERISTICS 85 

words which pleased him by a certain richness of form, 
such as " galiot," " cote-hardie," " chevesayle and man- 
telet," "stound," "grout," and so forth. With this 
went an ancient simplicity and directness of phrase, 
and a tendency to use monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon 
words. But in the House of Life the precise opposite 
is the case. Here he chose to employ a great variety 
of double words, a tendency perhaps traceable to his 
love for Keats, such as " we late-tottering world-worn 
hence," " dawn's first hill-fire," " winter-bitten, angel- 
greeted door," "wing-winnowed," "sky-breath and 
field-silence," and so forth. Together with these 
are a certain number of exotic words not always 
even correctly derived, such as culminant — gracile — 
lovelihead — unfeatured — garmented — queendom. 
Moreover in the sonnets he had a fancy for using great 
resonant classical words, with a certain roll of sound, 
such as "Night's inveteracy," "multiform circumflu- 
ence manifold," " auroral wind," " firmamental blue," 
"life's confederate pleas," "June's encomiast." We 
find such lines as "the unfettered irreversible goal," 
" Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes." Note 
such textures as — 

" Oh ! what is this that knows the road I came, 
The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame, 

The lifted shifted steeps and all the way ? — 
That draws round me at last this wind-warm space, 
And in regenerate rapture turns my face 

Upon the devious coverts of dismay ? " 

Or 

" Ah ! who shall dare to search through what sad maze 
Thenceforth their incommunicable ways 
Follow the desultory feet of death ? " 



86 ROSSETTI [chap. 

It will be observed in these last quotations there is 
a certain slight shifting of the usual meanings of words 
like commemorative, regenerate, and incommxmicahle, 
some slight nuance added to them which is not found 
in ordinary speech. This preciosity has a charm of its 
own, and upon this handling of language, this delicate 
straining of the use of words, depends much of the 
pleasure derivable from the work of masters of elaborate 
style. 

Eossetti composed his later sonnets carefully, work- 
ing the metal with endless elaboration, frequent re- 
touching, so as to cover every space with beauty. 
It remains that he is a master in both kinds of writing, 
though, perhaj)S, he is at his best when he is neither 
archaic nor elaborate. 

There is one very marked characteristic of Rossetti's 
lyrical writing which deserves special attention. It is 
what, to use a technical musical phrase, may be called 
his " attack." The lyric, or the sonnet, breaks upon the 
ear in a strong, arresting phrase, which at once puts 
the mind in tune for what follows. Such is the fine, 
abrupt opening of TJie Staff and Scrip — 

" ' Who rules these lands ? ' the Pilgrim said. 
'Stranger, Queen Blanchelys.' 
' And who has thus harried them ? ' he said. 
'It was Duke Luke did this : 
God's ban be his I ' 



The Pilgrim said : ' Where is your house ? 

I'll rest there, with your will.' 
* You've but to climb these blackened boughs 

And you'll see it over the hill, 
For it burns still.' " 



IV.] POEMS — CHARACTERISTICS 87 

The sonnets, contain even more notable instances, 
which it would be easy to multiply. Such lines as — 

" Girt in dark growths, yet glimmering with one star " 

from Sleepless Dreams ; or — 

" Look in my face ; my name is Might-have-been ; 
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell " ; 

from A Superscription, are of the same type. 

The tendency of the sonnet-writer as a rule is to 
reserve such effects for the climax ; but it is a truer 
economy to arouse the spirit at the outset as by a 
pealing trumpet-note, though such magnificence is 
only possible to writers of exuberant richness. It is 
notable, on looking through Rossetti's sonnets, how 
many of them have this massive opening. It is a 
real note of his most deliberate style. It is as when 
one waits in the stillness for the sounding of some 
far-off chime. At last the murmur, sweet as honey, 
comes softly brimming over, like water from an over- 
flowing vessel slowly filled. Then the music topples 
delicately down, till the great hovir-bell, in its wise, 
grave voice, proclaims the flight of time, and the hour 
is told. 

Another characteristic of Rossetti's writing, standing 
side by side with the gorgeousness both of word and 
phrase which he attained by such curious felicity, is 
the effect of dignity achieved by the severest 
simplicity, by the profuse employment of monosyllabic 
words. 

This is well exemplified by the close of an early 
sonnet, not wholly successful, On the Field of Waterloo, 



88 ROSSETTI [chap. 

which is redeemed from a certain ungainliness by the 
splendid close — 

" Am I to weep ? Good sirs, the earth is old : 
Of the whole earth there is no single spot 
But hath among its dust the dust of man." 

Again, in the admirable termination he put to the 
ancient stanza, How should lyouo' true-love know ? — An 
Old Song ended, comes a quatrain which reads even 
more like the work of his sister, in its almost child- 
like simplicity of phrase — 

" ' For a token is there nought, 
Say, that he should bring?' 
* He will bear a ring I gave 
And another ring.' " 

But it is, perhaps, in the sonnets that the most notable 
effects of this kind are to be observed. In the follow- 
ing extracts it may be noticed that for the closing 
line the very simplest and shortest words are employed. 
Thus, from Retro me, Sathana ! — 

" Thou still, upon the broad vine-sheltered path, 
Mayst wait the turning of the phials of wrath 
For certain years, for certain months and days." 

And again, from 7%e Hill Summit, an early sonnet — 

" And see the gold air and the silver fade 
And the last bird fly into the last light." 

And still more exquisitely in the closing two lines 
of Tlie One Hope, a sonnet which he ranked with his 
very best work, where the contrast with the more 



IV.] POEMS — CHARACTERISTICS 89 

ornate lines that precede makes the simple dignity- 
more forcible — 

" Ah ! when the wan soul in that golden au* 
Between the scriptured petals softly blown 
Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown, — 
Ah I let none other alien spell soe'er 
But only the one Hope's one name be there, — 
Not less nor more, but even that word alone." 

These extracts are sufficient to show that even in 
these latter days, when simple words have been worn 
threadbare by use, there is still room for perfect 
simplicity, and that the outfit is not too slender for 
the large enterprise. 

Rossetti's rather robust humour was as a rule care- 
fully excluded from his poems. It is interesting to 
study from this point of view the different versions 
of Tlie Burden of Nineveh, originally cast in a semi- 
humorous mould, and to see how the satirical passages 
fell out one by one. 

Another characteristic in which Rossetti exercised 
a severe restraint is that of pure fantasy. That he 
had it strongly developed there is no doubt. Such a 
whimsical sonnet as A Match with the Moon, where he 
" dogged the flying moon with similes," is a grotesque, 
like a Bewick, and shows a vivid imagination almost, 
as it were, in a fever-fit — 

" Like a wisp she doubled on my sight 
In ponds, and cavight in tree-tops like a kite 
And in a globe of film all liquorish 
Swam full-faced like a silly silver fish ; — 
Last like a bubble shot the welkin's height . . ." 

But it is clear that this was a species of juggling with 
art which Rossetti felt to be undignified, for such 



90 ROSSETTI [chap. 

experiments are excluded, as a rule, from his published 
work. 

Eossetti had a mood, to which he gave way but 
sparingly, of making words into a kind of vague 
music. As a rule, the conception dominates him ; but 
there are poems which are like a sweet modulation, 
where the effect is produced not by the adaptation 
of the words to the central thought, but by a species 
of murmuring melody, in which the thoughts seem 
blurred upon the edge of a gentle slumber. Such 
pre-eminently is Lovers Nocturn — 

" There the dreams are multitudes : 
Some that will not wait for sleep, 
Deep within the August woods ; 

Some that hum while rest may steep 
Weary labour laid a-heap ; 

Interludes, 
Some, of grievous moods that weep. 

Poets' fancies all are there : 

There the elf-girls flood with wings 

Valleys full of plaintive air ; 

There breathe perfumes ; there in rings 
Whirl the foam-bewildered springs ; 

Siren there 
Winds her dizzy hair and sings." 

Such a line as " Valleys full of plaintive air " attains 
perhaps the highest beauty which such slumberous art 
can reach. 

A word must be said of Rossetti's use of the super- 
natural. It played a large part in his ballads; but 
here too he shows his art in the vigilant restraint 
which he imposed upon himself. There is nothing 
melodramatic about his use of it ; but the wind blows 



IV.] POEMS — CHARACTERISTICS 91 

cold out of the inner slirine of fear. In the early- 
poem The Portrait is a passage, chosen, by some incom- 
prehensible error, by Buchanan, to illustrate the thesis 
that Kossetti's writing was " formally slovenly and 
laboriously limp," but which stands in the very first 
rank of the poetry that brings a sense of dim mystery 
and remote horror to the mind — 

"In painting her I shrined her face 

'Mid mystic trees, where light falls in 

Hardly at all; a covert place 

Where you might think to find a din 

Of doubtful talk, and a live flame 

Wandering, and many a shape whose name 
Not itself knoweth, and old dew, 
And your own footsteps meeting you, 

And all things going as they came." ^ 

Again, could a certain kind of haunted nightmare 
and shapeless terror be more powerfully expressed 
than in this passage from Love's Nocturn 9 — 

" Reft of her, my dreams are all 

Clammy trance that fears the sky : 
Changing footpaths shift and faU; 
From polluted coverts nigh. 
Miserable phantoms sigh; 

Quakes the pall. 
And the funeral goes by." 

Again, in Rose Mary, a poem full from end to end of 
the subtlest supernatural imagery, the description of 

1 It is interesting to study in the original mss., as I have 
been enabled to do by the kindness of Mr. William Rossetti 
and Mr. Fairfax Murray, the various stages of the careful 
process by which this particular poem was elaborated. It will 
suffice here to say that the most characteristic lines of the 
above stanza are to be found in the earliest draft. 



92 ROSSETTI [chap. 

the great Beryl stands out pre-eminent — 

" With shuddering light 'twas stirred and strewn 
Like the cloud-nest of the wading moon : 
Freaked it was as the bubble's ball, 
Rainbow-hued through a misty pall 
Like the middle light of the waterfall." 

Another characteristic of Eossetti's writing is the 
way in which one is suddenly brought face to face, in a 
few simple words, with an intensity of tragic feeling 
that leaves the mind breathless with the stress of 
passion. Such is the moment in Sister Helen, where the 
last agonised prayer of the old father, Keith of Keith, 
for his son's life, falls in vain on the desperate ears — 

" ' Oh he prays you, as his heart would rive, 
Sister Helen, 
To save his dear son's soul alive.' 
' Fire cannot slay it, it shall thrive, 

Little brother ! ' " 

Or the moment when Kose Mary, searching with her 
eye the imaged landscape for the ambush which she 
knows lurks somewhere — 

" ' Hush, sweet, hush ! be calm and behold.' 
* I see two floodgates broken and old: 
The grasses wave o'er the ruined weir, 
But the bridge still leads to the breakwater; 
And — mother, mother, O mother dear ! ' " 

Or again in TJie Staff and Scrip, when the dead warrior 
is brought back to the queen who had been hoping 
against hope that he would return in triumph — 

" ' Oh what do ye bring out of the fight, 
Thus hid beneath these boughs?' 
' Thy conquering guest returns to-night, 
And yet shall not carouse, 
Queen, in thy house.' 



IV.] POEMS — CHARACTERISTICS 93 

' Uncover ye his face,' she said. 

' O changed in little space ! ' 
She cried, ' O pale that was so red ! 

O God, O God of grace I 
Cover his face.' " 

In the matter of rhyme Eossetti was easily con- 
tented. As a rule his rhymes conform to ordinary 
rules, but there are cases where the weakness of rhyme 
is difficult to justify. Not to travel far for instances, 
one finds such rhymes as " of " and " enough " not un- 
frequently, and — which I think is the lowest level he 
ever reached — in Ede7i Bower occurs the following — 

" ' All save one I give to thy freewill, — 
The Tree of the' Knowledge of Good and Evil,' " 

which cannot be defended on any grounds. 

The one kind of rhyme which is extremely charac- 
teristic of Eossetti is a strong syllable associated in 
rhyme with a weak one — 

" And gay squires stilled the merry stir, 
When he passed up the dais-chamber." 

(It may be noted, in passing, that he pronounced dais 
as a monosyllable.) And again in Rose Mary — 

" Nay, the flags are stirred in the breeze. 
And the water's bright through the dart-rushes." 

These rhymes were used partly deliberately to give a 
pleasing contrast ; but partly, I think, Eossetti's ear 
gave weak endings a certain emphasis which a pure- 
bred Englishman would hardly affix to them. This 
tendency was skilfully parodied by Buchanan in 



94 ROSSETTI [chap. 

TJie Fleshly School of Poetry — 

" When winds do roar and rains do pour, 
Hard is the life of the sailor : 
He scarcely, as he reels, can tell 
The side-lights from the binnacle : 
He looketh on the wild water." 

We are told, it will be remembered, that in Eossetti's 
reading there was an '' insistence on the rhythm," and 
" a prolonged tension of the rhyme-sounds," which was 
very noticeable. And such lines as 

" And when the night-vigil was done," 
and 

" Say nothing now unto her, lest she weep," 

which last recalls the tones of Mr. Chadband, are 
sufficient, I think, to prove, either that he was not 
fully aware how destitute of emphasis the final 
syllables of English words tend to be, or that he dis- 
approved of slurring them over, and deliberately 
adopted a more distinct pronunciation. 

In the early poems, written when the Pre-Eaphaelite 
influence was very strong, there is a deliberate naivete 
of style, a prominence of homely detail, which he after- 
wards entirely discarded. Such touches as occur, for 
instance, in My Sister's Sleep, show a close power of 
observation of small accessory effects. Take, for 
instance — 

" Her little work-table was spread 

With work to finish. For the glare 
Made by her candle, she had care 
To work some distance from the bed." 



IV.] POEMS — CHAKACTERISTICS 96 

And again — 

" Our mother rose from where she sat : 
Her needles, as she laid them down, 
Met lightly, and her silken gown 
Settled : no other noise than that." 

But occasionally this early simplicity rises into a 
stateliness which has a special charm of its own, very 
different from the gorgeous dignity of his later work. 
The close of Tlie Portrait, written about 1848, is a fine 
example of the earlier manner — 

" Here with her face doth memory sit 
Meanwhile, and wait the day's decline, 
Till other eyes shall look from it, 

Eyes of the spirit's Palestine, 
Even than the old gaze tenderer : 
While hojaes and aims long lost with her 
Stand round her image side by side, 
Like tombs of pilgrims that have died 
About the Holy Sepulchre." 

The Ave, too, of the same date, has something of the 
same artlessness — 

" To whose white bed had come the dream 
That He was thine and thou wast His 
Who feeds among the field-lilies." 

There is no English poet of the nineteenth century 
who has so little of the instinctive love of Nature as 
Eossetti. He was essentially an indoors poet. To 
begin with, his life, with interludes of practically a few 
months, except for the time he lived at Kelmscott, was 
spent in London, and then mostly in his own house. 
He rose late and worked during daylight. Thus he 
had but a small store of experiences to draw upon 
when compared with other English poets of his age. 
He disliked bodily activity, and even when he did 



96 KOSSETTI [chap. 

walk, it is recorded that he often seemed to take no 
particular notice of the world about him. His pleas- 
ure in the Kelmscott landscape seems largely to have 
been built upon the fact that it contained so few dis- 
turbing elements. 

This tendency, however, gives his poetry a certain 
strength ; he is never tempted to expatiate upon the 
landscape, but it is always subordinated to the central 
thought with an artistic restraint which is apt to be 
violated even by Tennyson himself. Landscape is, in 
fact, strictly an accessory in Rossetti; and, one is 
tempted to think, always pictorially conceived. 

At the same time, he had the faculty of close and 
delicate observation when he chose to employ it; and 
if his eyes had been more trained in recording 
and storing impressions of Nature, it is clear that he 
would have excelled in natural description. Scattered 
up and down his writings are touches of skilful pic- 
torial art, such as — 

" Where the long cloud, the long wood's counterpart 
Sheds doubled darkness up the labouring hill." 

Or, what is one of the most carefully studied effects ; 
a great flight of starlings, seen at Kelmscott — 

" Sun-steeped in fire, the homeward pinions sway 

Above the dovecote-tops ; 
And clouds of starlings, ere they rest with day, 
Sink, clamorous like mill-waters, at wild play 

By turns in every copse. 

Each tree heart-deep the wrangling rout receives, — 

Save for the whirr within, 
You could not tell the starlings from the leaves; 
Then one great puff of wings, and the swarm heaves 

Away with all its din." 



IV.] POEMS — CHARACTERISTICS 97 

He has a great power of bringing a scene rapidly 
before the eye by one delicate stroke — as in Sister 
Helen — 

" * Outside it's merry in the wmd's wake, 

Sister Helen ; 
In the shaken trees the chill stars shake.' 
* Hush, heard you a horse-tread as you spake, 

Little brother?'" 
Again — 

" * Here high up in the balcony, 

Sister Helen, 
The moon flies face to face with me.' " 

And again, from the Last Confession — 

" And from the fountains of the public place 
Unto the i:)igeon-haunted pinnacles, 
Bright wings and water winnowed the bright air." 

The above all show with what a sure instinct he 
laid his finger on the one salient feature, and wasted 
no words about it. Only the best word-artists can 
afford to show such an austerity of reserve. 

The traces of the influence of other poets upon 
Eossetti are small. His early admiration for Browning 
is, however, clearly enough indicated in A Last Con- 
fession. The opening is exactly in the manner of 
Browning, and many cadences throughout the poem 
are built up in Browning's semi-conversational style — 

" Our Lombard country-girls along the coast 
Wear daggers in their garters : for they know 
That they might hate another girl to death 
Or meet a German lover. Such a knife 
I bought her, with a hilt of horn and pearl." 

There is a trace, I believe, of Coleridge's influence 
in the Blessed Damozel, as will be pointed out. 



98 ROSSETTI [chap. 

The Tennysonian influence is hardly perceptible; 
bat in the early poem The Portrait, to which allusion 
has been made, occurs a stanza which might well stand 
as the work of Tennyson — 

" But when that hour my soul won strength 

For words whose silence wastes and kills, 
Dull raindrops smote us, and at length 

Thundered the heat within the hills. 
That eve I spoke those words again 
Beside the pelted window-pane ; 

And there she hearkened what I said, 

With under-glances that siu'veyed 
The empty pastures blind with rain." 

And that a real and fundamental similarity existed 
between the poets is exemplified by The Lady ofShalott, 
a poem both in conception and handling strongly re- 
sembling Eossetti's work. 

Of course the ballads are bound to show traces of 
the influence of the ballad literature which Eossetti 
studied so eagerly. But the only ballad which is 
purely archaic in handling is Strattoa Water ; while of 
the Euphuistic Jacobean style there is but one trace 
that I can detect — a couplet in the Ave which might 
have come straight from Crashaw — 

"The cherubim, succinct, conjoint, 
Float inward to a golden point," 

though it is, of course, an effect studied from early 
Tuscan painting. These slight traces of Eossetti's 
style being to any extent, even superficially, affected 
by literary influence are just enough to show how 
entirely original his manner was. 

Keats, it must be added, was the chosen poet of 



IV.] POEMS — CHARACTERISTICS 99 

the Pre-Rapliaelites : they read him, quoted him, and 
designed pictures from his poems. Perhaps Rossetti's 
preferences here as elsewhere were dominant ; but 
Keats's whole treatment of a subject was, so to speak, 
almost typically Pre-Kaphaelite. There was the strong 
conception of the situation, the powerful motive of 
passion, the chivalrous view of woman, and all set in 
a framework of exquisite detail, luxuriously lavish, 
and precisely delineated. Such poems as The Eve of 
St. Agnes — 

" And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, 
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd, 
While lie from forth the closet brought a heap 
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd 
With jellies soother than the creamy curd, 
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon ; 
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred 
From Fez ; and spiced dainties, every one, 
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon " ; 

and the unfinished Eve of St. Mark — 

" The city streets were clean and fair 
From wholesome drench of April rains ; 
And, on the western window panes, 
The chilly sunset faintly told 
Of unmatured green, valleys cold. 
Of the green, thorny, bloomless hedge, 
Of rivers new with spring-tide sedge, 
Of primroses by shelter'd rills, 
And daisies on the aguish hills. 



Her shadow, in uneasy guise, 
Hover'd about, a giant size, 
On ceiling-beam and old oak chair, 
The parrot's cage, and panel square ; 



tLofC. 



100 KOSSETTI [chap. iv. 

And the warm angled winter-screen, 
On which were many monsters seen, 
Call'd doves of Siam, Lima mice, 
And legless birds of Paradise, 
Macaw, and tender Av'davat, 
And silken-furr'd Angora cat," 

are typical instances of subjects treated as the Pre- 
Eaphaelites treated them. 



CHAPTER V 

POEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 

There are nine poems of Rossetti's that may be 
called ballads, — though he himself called only three 
of them ballads, and included the other six among 
the Poems. 

These are Rose Mary, in three parts, Tlie White Ship, 
TJie Kinc/s Tragedy ; and to these we may add Sister 
Helen, TJie Bride's Prelude (unfinished), Tlie Staff and 
Scrip, Troy Town, Eden Bower, and Stratton Water. 
That is to say, all of these poems include a narrative, 
though Sister Helen is in reality a drama, the whole 
story being told by two speakers. 

Of course it must be admitted that, in the strictest 
sense of the word, none of these poems are in reality 
ballads. A ballad is a narrative poem dealing with 
some contemporary episode, and its characteristics are 
simplicity and directness. It owes its force to associa- 
tion, sincerity, and a primal impulse of dramatic 
emotion. A modern ballad must be either an attempt 
to imitate from a literary point of view existing 
ballads — Stratton Water is an instance of this — or 
else the using of an archaic and traditional form 
enriched with later art and colour. 

Of Rossetti's ballads Sister Helen is the noblest, as 
101 



102 ROS'SETTI [chap. 

Bose Mary is the richest. Sister Helen is probably the 
highest achievement of his art. It was written in 
1851, and first published in the Dilsseldorf Magazine, 
then edited and published in Germany by Mary 
Howitt. It was issued in book-form with further 
alterations at Oxford in 1857 ; and this is the rarest, 
perhaps, of all Rossetti's publications. Some small 
additions were made in 1870, but the 1881 edition 
was considerably amplified. Interesting as the ques- 
tion of the additions is, it is not proposed to discuss 
them here.^ It will suffice to say that the interpola- 
tions are all improvements, though few of them quite 
rank with the best of the original stanzas. 

The motif of the poem is that of a woman in a lonely 
hill-castle melting the waxen image of her false lover, 
and the arrival of his brother, his father, and his 
wedded wife to pray for mercy ; but she persists in 
her task to the dreadful end. The poem is a con- 
versation between Helen herself and her little brother, 
who is set in the window to watch what may befall, 
while the slow agony is in progress. 

Each stanza has a refrain, which is slightly varied 
in each verse, and which makes the poem peculiarly 
difficult to read aloud. 

But the deadly hate of Helen burning like a flame, 
the madness born of poisoned love, the raging passion 
glowing beneath her stony despair, brought out in con- 
trast with the innocent talk of the child, who watches 
the terrible drama with the unshrinking interest of 
childhood, make the poem one of the most exciting, 
to use a simple word, that can be conceived ; and over 

^ They will be found carefully collated in Mr. "William 
Sharp's study, Dante Gabriel Bossetti, p. 359, etc. 



v.] TOEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 103 

it all broods a deadly fear, which culminates in the 
final stanza in a breathless horror. 

There is no prelude ; we are plunged at once, by a 
simple question of the child, in the very thick of the 
action ; — 

" ' Why did. you melt your waxen man, 
Sister Helen? 
To-day is the third since you began.' 
' The time was long, yet the time ran, 
Little brother.' 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 
Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven !) " 

Slowly the terrible drama progresses. Helen, worn 
with despair and rage, sinks on the floor, and the child 
mounts to the balcony, where the moon flies through 
broken clouds. The brothers of the dying man come 
and beg to speak with Helen, and tell the boy of their 
brother's agony ; he no longer prays to live, only to 
depart. Then the old Baron himself, Keith of Keith, 
comes — 

" * He cries to you, kneeling in the road, 

Sister Helen, 
To go with him for the love of God ! ' 
* The way is long to his son's abode, 

Little brother.' " 

Then the sad bride herself comes ; and at last, realising 
the relentless doom, all ride away ; the last drops of wax 
hiss in the fire, and the flames rise ; the soul is free; — 

" ' Ah ! what white thing at the door has cross'd, 

Sister Helen? 
Ah ! what is this that sighs in the frost ? ' 



104 ROSSETTI [chap. 

* A soul that's lost as mine is lost, 

Little brother ! ' 
(O Mother, Mary Mother, 
Lost, lost, all lost, between Hell and Heaven !) " 

I believe that Bose Mary may be regarded, not per- 
haps as the best of Rossetti's writings, but as the most 
characteristic. In this ballad are blended all the strains 
that were most potent in his mind. The setting is 
purely romantic, there is the passion of erring and 
slighted love, and the whole poem is dominated 
by the deepest and most mystical supernaturalism. 
Eossetti's attitude towards the supernatural can be 
simply defined. He did not, I suppose, believe in the 
reality of it, in the sense that he expected to encounter 
it habitually in real life — though in his disordered 
moods there are hints that he believed himself to be 
directly in the presence of strange spiritual forces. 
Neither did he probably trouble his head about 
whether such agencies had in the past ever actually 
been at work. But the supernatural was, so to speak, 
an article of his imaginative creed ; the conception of 
it affected him profoundly, and he had an almost child- 
like relish for supernatural situations. The result was 
that he wrote of such things not half shamefacedly 
or ingeniously, but simply and with a kind of direct 
conviction, which is the essence of sincere art. 

The scheme of the poem is this : the maiden Rose 
Mary is betrothed to Sir James of Heronhaye, and 
with her mother is awaiting his coming. He is to ride 
to Holy Cross Abbey at break of day, to be absolved 
for past sins before the wedding takes place; but 
he is menaced, the mother knows, by some obscure 
and deadly peril ; an ambush is to be laid for him. In 



v.] TOEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 105 

tlie castle is a mystical stone, the Beryl, in which pure 
eyes can read what is to be. Mother and daughter 
consult the stone, and Rose Mary sees the landscape, 
through which Sir James is to pass, winding before 
her, while with her eyes she searches it for the 
ambush. In a stanza of extraordinary vividness she 
sees spearmen hidden by the floodgates of a ruined 
weir, among whom is the Warden of Holycleugh. 
The mother, fearing further peril, makes the girl 
explore the hillside above, cleft after cleft of the 
great hill-folds. One of these is brimmed with mist, 
but there is no trace of any visible ambush there. 

In the second part, the mother has learned the secret, 
that her daughter is not the pure maiden she believed, 
but has yielded herself to Sir James. Then the mother 
breaks to her the dreadful news, that looking thus in 
the Beryl, without the purity of heart that would 
have disclosed the truth, she has been misled; that the 
ambush was hidden in the hollow filled with mist, 
and that Sir James has been borne home dead. Rose 
Mary falls into a swoon, and the mother goes to the 
room where the dead man lies, and there on his heart 
finds a bloodstained packet, with a paper and a lock 
of hair, from Jocelind, the sister of Holycleugh ; and 
learning that Sir James had not even been true to her 
whom he has betrayed, she spurns the dead in a 
passion of rage. 

In the third part a cloud has fallen on Rose Mary's 
mind; she wanders restlessly about the castle, and 
finds the secret way to the underground chapel where 
the gem is kept ; she finds it, and in an access of de- 
spair, she cleaves the Beryl with her father's sword. 
The spirits of the stone fly forth, and Rose Mary dies. 



106 KOSSETTI [chap. 

At' the end of each part comes a curious lyrical 
outburst, called the Beryl-songs, the chant of the im- 
prisoned spirits, which are intended to weld the poem 
together and to supply connections. It is said that 
Mr. Watts-Dunton, when he first read the poem in 
proof, said to Rossetti that the drift was too intricate 
for an ordinary reader. Rossetti took this to heart, 
and wrote the Beryl-songs to bridge the gaps: Mr. 
Watts-Dunton, on being shown them, very rightly dis- 
approved, and said humorously that they turned a 
fine ballad into a bastard opera. Eossetti, who was 
ill at the time, was so much disconcerted and upset at 
the criticism, that Mr. Watts-Dunton modified his judg- 
ment, and the interludes were printed. But at a later 
date Eossetti himself came round to the opinion that 
they were inappropriate. They are curiously wrought, 
rhapsodical, irregular songs, with fantastic rhymes, and 
were better away. 

But the poem itself has a peculiar colour and charm, 
as of forms seen through the clear waters of a pool. 
There is an air of fallen light and dim richness over 
all. The rhyme scheme is simple : each stanza is a 
couplet followed by a triplet of rhymes, and the quad- 
ruple beat is varied by dactylic and anapaestic move- 
ments. It opens thus ; — 

" * Mary mine that art Mary's Rose, 
Come in to me from the garden-close. 
The sun sinks fast with the rising dew, 
And we marked not how the faint moon grew; 
But the hidden stars are calling you.' " 

When the Beryl is replaced in its wrappings, the 
wizard music, which heralded its disclosure, again 
comes upon the air; — 



v.] POEMS — 7/0 fJ/S^" OF LIFE 107 

" As the globe slid to its silken gloom, 
Once more a music rained through the room ; 
Low it splashed like a sweet star-spray, 
And sobbed like tears at the heart of May, 
And died as laughter dies away." 

I have never been able to feel that either Tlie 
White Ship or The King's Tragedy has the pecnliar 
quality of Eossetti's work. Of the latter, Pater says : 
" Perhaps, if one had to name a single composition of 
Eossetti's to a reader who desired to make acquaintance 
with him for the first time, it is The King's Tragedy one 
would select — that poem so moving, so popularly 
dramatic and lifelike." This may be the case to a 
certain extent, and it is true that it is a fine historical 
ballad. " It is a ripper, I can tell you ! " wrote Eossetti 
of it characteristically to Mr. Hall Caine ; and he also 
told Mr. Gosse that he meant it to be one of a series 
of " extended ballads " from Scottish history ; but he 
wrote no more. 

The subject is the murder of King James the First 
of Scotland, when, in order to save him from the 
conspirators in the Black Friars' monastery at Perth, 
Catherine Douglas thrust her arm through the door- 
staples, to keep the murderers out. The door was 
forced in, Catherine falling back with a shattered arm, 
and the king was murdered in the hiding-place in 
which he had taken refuge. In honour of her deed 
she received the name of Kate Barlass. She, in her 
age, is supposed to relate the story ; but though there 
are many beautiful lines and images in the poem, there 
is also a preponderance of conscientiously historical, 
but — may it be hinted — dull stanzas. It is, of course, 
a matter of opinion j but one feels that Eossetti was 



108 EOSSETTI [chap. 

fettered by facts, and one misses the radiant and 
mysterious working of imagination which was the mark 
of the real Rossetti. Some lines, moreover, are intro- 
duced to give verisimilitude out of James's own poem 
The lunges Quhair, which are clipped down from ten- 
syllabled lines into eight-syllabled couplets to suit the 
metre of the poem. 

The same lack of individuality is the case in an even 
more marked degree with TJie Wliite Ship. The ballad 
was nominally written in 1880 for the children of 
Mr. William Eossetti, and has the very defects that 
one might forecast for a poem that Rossetti was 
endeavouring to adapt to a special audience. 

The story is the familiar one of the loss of Prince 
William, the son of Henry I., in the White Ship. 
Henry I. had crossed to Normandy to secure the 
allegiance of the Norman barons, and was returning 
in triumph. The White Ship, commanded by Fitz- 
Stephen, the royal hereditary pilot, started after the 
rest of the fleet ; the vessel sank in mid-channel, and 
all on board were drowned, except Berold, the butcher 
of Rouen, who tells the tale. 

The Bride's Prelude, never finished, belongs to the 
early period, being written about 1848 or 1849, when 
Rossetti showed it to William Bell Scott. It was not 
published till 1881. The original alternative title was 
Bridechamher Talk. It represents the maiden Aloyse 
sitting with her sister Amelotte, on a day of heavy 
summer heat. Aloyse, very sick at heart, is being 
attired for her wedding. She lifts her head suddenly — 

" ' Sister,' said Aloyse, ' I had 
A thing to tell thee of 
Long since, and could not. ' " 



v.] TOEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 109 

She bids Amelotte pray, and then begins the story of 
her shame, by first uttering the name of her bride- 
groom that is to be, Urscelyn. She tells of her sad 
and timid childhood, how she was one day forced to 
ride with her brothers, fell, and was carried back to the 
house. Urscelyn, a young squire, a kinsman of her own, 
who has some skill in medicine, is summoned to attend 
her. He learns to love her, tells his love, and at last 
she yields herself to him. The sense of her shame 
grows upon her ; but the castle is attacked and burned, 
and the court have to fly. Urscelyn in the hour of their 
need deserts them. Aloyse escapes with her father 
and brothers to a place of safety, where her shame is 
discovered. Her child is born and taken from her; 
they recover their lands, and Urscelyn comes back. 
At this point the poem ends, and was never finished, 
though just at the end of his life Eossetti took it up 
again with that intention, and his sketch of the plot 
is preserved. 

The charm of the poem is not in the dramatic 
situation. It is undoubtedly true that the progress is 
too slow, and that there is a certain strain about the 
mood. In reading it, the consuming agony of Aloyse 
and the sense of the hot and sultry day become 
almost intolerable. One longs alike for a breath of 
hope to cool the anguished heart of the bride, and for 
a fresh wind to cool the fever of the sun. 

The beauty of the poem lies rather in the fine 
dramatic episodes which occur in the course of it, as 
in the card-playing scene where the girl's shame is 
symbolised, or the scene where the father strikes 
down the sword which the brother turns against 
Aloyse's breast. 



110 KOSSETTI [chap. 

Moreover the workmanship and the detail are 
throughout of the most delicate ; the detail is rich and 
yet simple, like the careful accessories of a picture. 
The metre is curious : the first and second lines have 
no corresponding rhyme, and this is followed by a 
triplet which has the same rhyme — in places this gives 
the poem a prosaic effect. 

But the poem seems rather like a secret treasury 
of beautiful things, heaped up in careful profusion, 
than a tale that is told. No work of Rossetti's is more 
typical of the Pre-Raphaelite spirit; but the central 
theme is lost among the wealth of detail lavished 
upon it. 

Such stanzas as the following are wrought like a 
tapestry; — 

" Although the lattice had dropped loose, 
There was no wind ; the heat 
Being so at rest that Amelotte 
Heard far beneath the phmge and float 
Of a hound swimming in the moat. 

Some minutes since, two rooks had toiled 

Home to the nests that crowned 
Ancestral ash-trees. Through the glare 
Beating again, they seemed to tear 
With that thick caw the woof o' the air. 

But else, 'twas at the dead of noon 

Absokite silence; all. 
From the raised bridge and guarded sconce 
To green-clad places of pleasaunce 
Where the long lake was white with swans." 

Tlie Staff and Scrip was written about 1852, and has 
all the fine freshness of the earlier work. It was 



v.] FOE^iS — HOUSE OF LIFE 111 

published in 1856 in tlie Oxford and Cambridge 
Magazine. Canon Dixon, who may, however, have 
been biassed by his association with the poet at the 
time of its composition, considered it " the finest of all 
Eossetti's poems, and one of the most glorious writings 
in the language. It exhibits," he adds, " in flawless 
perfection the gift that he had above all other writers 
— absolute beauty and pure action." The idea is taken 
from the Gesta Bomanormn, and it is the story of a 
pilgrim who for love of Queen Blanchelys undertakes 
to meet in fight Duke Luke, who has burned and 
harried her lands. He arms himself with armour 
given by the queen, and leaves his staff and scrip 
with her. He is slain and brought back dead, and 
she hangs the staff and scrip over her bed for years, 
until she dies, waiting to meet him in triumph in 
heaven. 

This poem has the fine naivete and directness, to- 
gether with a certain stiff stateliness of phrase that 
Rossetti lost or discarded in his later work. 

What could be more delicate than the following ? — 

♦' The Queen sat idle by her loom : 
She heard the arras stir, 
And looked up sadly : through the room 
The sweetness sickened her 
Of musk and myrrh." 

And again after the battle, when she takes the staff 
and scrip — 

" That night they hung above her bed, 
Till morning wet with tears. 
Year after year above her head 
Her bed his token wears, 
Five years, ten years." 



112 KOSSETTI [CHAP. 

And the close has a pure nobility wliich ends like a 
solemn music ; — 

"Not tithed with days' and years' decease 
He pays thy wage He owed, 
But with imperishable peace 
Here in His own abode, 
Thy jealous God." 

Troy Town was written in 1869, and was for a time 
one of Rossetti's own favourite poems ; but there is an 
excess of sensuous expression throughout. It represents 
Helen praying at the shrine of Venus. Venus smiles 
to see that her work is so well done, and Cupid looses 
an arrow from his string that strikes the heart of 
Paris, and with the following stanza the poem closes j — 

" Paris turned upon his bed, 

(0 Troy Town !) 
Turned upon his bed and said, 
Dead at heart with the heart's desire — 
' Oh to clasp her golden head ! ' 

( Troi/s dotvn, 

Tall T^roy's on fire ly 

Eden Bower, which Rossetti called " a splendid sub- 
ject," was written shortly after Troy Town. The 
subject is the legend of Lilith, once a snake herself, 
and, after the creation of Adam, turned into a woman, 
and beloved by him. But she has been first the mate 
of the serpent of evil, and in a passionate jealousy of 
the nobler happiness of Adam with his human partner, 
and enraged at her own expulsion from Paradise, she 
appeals, in some bewitched grove outside Eden, to the 
Serpent, to help her in her revenge ; to allow her to 
assume his form for an hour that she may tempt and 
destroy the happy pair. She exults over the success 



v.] TOEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 113 

which she foresees, over all the misery which will 
ensue, and over the joy with which she will return to 
her first mate. She sings — 

<' ' O but Adam was thrall to Lilith ! 
(Alas the hour I) 
All the threads of my hair are golden, 
And there in a net his heart was holden.' " 

But here again there is a certain baseness of physical 
horror at the idea, which is dwelt on throvighout the 
poem, of the embrace of the snake. The i/'wpos o^ts 
has an instinctive repulsion for humanity, which 
poisons the beauty of the poem at its source. 

Stratton Water, as has been said, is an almost purely 
archaic revival. Eossetti considered it " successful 
only in so far as any imitation of the old ballad can 
be successful," but, within this degree, he believed 
it to be as good as anything of the kind by any 
living writer. It was much altered from its original 
draft. 

The story is of a maiden, Janet, who has given 
herself to Lord Sands, and goes out, wild with despair, 
to drown herself in the flooded Stratton Water. Lord 
Sands has been led to believe her dead, but he finds her 
on the edge of the stream, catches a floating boat, rows 
her to the church, where they are married, and home 
for her child to be born. 

To turn to the principal lyrics, in considering the 
poem of the Blessed Damozel, the thought that the poem 
was written in early youth must always be attended by 
a certain wonder. It seems probable that Eossetti had 
the poem in his mind when he once wrote that a writer 
must often do some of his best work at an early age. 



114 EOSSETTI [chap. 

and find it out later in a rage. The poem has all the 
freshness of youth, the delight that attends the radiant 
spirit, nursed in dreams of beauty, when it finds that 
it too can achieve, and feels the thrill and stir of the 
lute-strings answering faithfully the timid and adoring 
touch. Though at first sight the delicate archaic 
handling of language is a great attraction, yet it is the 
combination of vastness and nearness in the poem 
which lends it an incomparable charm. We find our- 
selves rapt into a far-off aerial distance — 

" Beneath, the tides of day and night 
With flame and darkness ridge 
The void, as low as where this earth 
Spins like a fretful midge." 

The daring of this touch, the directness so character- 
istic of the Pre-Raphaelite idea, the almost meanness 
of the comparison, is only justified by the sense of 
immensity that it lends — 

" From the fixed place of Pleaven she saw 
Time like a pulse shake fierce 
Through all the worlds." 

But then, in contrast to the depth and distance of the 
picture, comes the thought of the nearness and close- 
ness of the tie of human love, that passes through the 
dizzy spaces like an electric thrill, and holds the 
longing, faithful hearts close together, even though one 
stands in the tranquil and serene fortress of heaven, 
and the other spins, a fevered mortal atom, in the poor, 
fretful world. There is the gentle faith in the far-off 
union, the passionate heart forecasting the perfect 
happiness of the meeting. " ' For he will come,' she 
said." 



v.] VO'EMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 115 

Another daring and exquisite device is the inter- 
jecting at intervals, in language of perfect simplicity 
and yet without the archaism of the main poem, the 
thoughts of the distant lover, still enchained by earth — 

" (Ah sweet ! Even now, in that bii'd's song, 
Strove not her accents there, 
Fain to be hearkened ? When those bells 

Possessed the mid-day air, 
Strove not her steps to reach my side 
Down aU the echoing stair ?) " 

The delicate quaintness of the poem is in itself a charm, 
though it is strained to its utmost limits in the verse 
that tells the names of the five handmaidens of Mary, 
or the angels with ^' their citherns and citoles " ; but 
even here the informing spirit of the whole is present, 
and there is no sense of literary ornament. They are 
only the sweet accessories, told as a child might tell 
them, of a definite scene. 

There is no need to trace the genesis of the poem, 
for indeed it owes little to any previous writer ; but 
I have sometimes thought that the Ancient Mariner 
was the germ of the treatment, though with little 
affinity of thought. There is a distant echo of Cole- 
ridge in the stanza — 

" The sun was gone now ; the curled moon 
Was like a Httle feather 
Fluttering far down the gulf; and now 
She spoke tlu-ough the still weather." 

The poem was constantly retouched. The beautiful 
lines in the first stanza — 

" Her eyes were deeper than the depth 
Of waters stilled at even " 



116 ROSSETTI [chap. 

ran originally — 

" Her blue grave eyes were deeper much 
Than a deep water even " 

and passed through an intermediate stage, in the 
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, as — 

" Her eyes knew more of rest and shade 
Than waters stilled at even." 

In the fourteenth stanza — 

" And see our old prayers, granted, melt 
Each like a little cloud" 

originally ran, in the Germ — 

" And where each need, revealed, expects 
Its patient period." 

But the most interesting series of alterations will be 
found in stanza seven — 

" Around her, lovers, newly met 
'Mid deathless love's acclaims, 
Spoke evermore among themselves 
Their heart-remembered names." 

The second line is not wholly satisfactory, because it 
is not quite clear whether the praise of deathless love 
or the praises uttered by lovers who have passed into 
life is meant. In the Germ it ran — 

" Heard hardly, some of her new friends 
Playing at holy games. 
Spake, gentle-mouthed among themselves, 
Their virginal new names " 

and it passed through two separate stages before it 
reached its final form. 

So stands this beautiful poem, a supreme instance 



v.] FOEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 117 

of the charging of an ancient form with the most 
passionate dreams of to-day.^ 

The poem of Jenny stands alone among Eossetti's 
poems as Found among his pictures. It gives us the 
regretful feeling that Eossetti's art did not reach its 
full and free development. It is a piece of the very 
stuff of life; it is water drawn from life's deepest and 
bitterest well, and presented in a chalice of pure gold. 
It is far beyond any sermon, for it is the thing itself, 
the saddest thing that the world can hold. The near- 
est approach to a moral is in the concluding lines — 

" Well, of such thoughts so much I know : 
In my life, as in hers, they show, 
By a far gleam which I may near, 
A dark path I can strive to clear." 

The poem is put in the mouth of one who has lived 
a careless life in his youth, but has found his work in 
the world — it is hinted that he is a writer of books. 
One evening he has a sudden impulse toward the old 
and half -forgotten days of so-called pleasure ; he meets 
at some dancing-hall a girl, whose fallen life has not 
as yet dimmed her childish beautj'', and accompanies 
her home. There she falls asleep with her head on 
his knee ; he does not wake her, but muses over what 
she was, is, and will be: there comes into his mind 
the thought of a girl, a young cousin of his, whose 
nature is as thoughtless and pleasure-loving, but who 
is sheltered by circumstances, and for whom waits a 
happy and unsullied love. The wonder, the hopeless 

1 The alterations in the text are well worth careful study. 
They are conveniently and carefully summarised by Mr. Wil- 
liam Sharp on pp. 339, 340, of his Dcuite Gabriel Hossetti. 



118 ROSSETTI [chap. 

and bewildering riddle of why sucli things should be 
comes before him : why evil should set its mark upon 
one of the lilies of the garden of life and not upon 
another, and what restoration is possible — 

" What lullaby 
Of sweet forgetful second birth 
Remains ? All dark. No sign on earth 
What measure of God's rest endows 
The many mansions of His house." 

Jenny is a plaything ; she does not understand what 
is happening, and she drifts along taking such pleas- 
ure as comes in her way, dancing into the shadow of 
death. 

The problem is only stated; no solution is at- 
tempted, no far-off hope shines beyond the dark cloud. 
Only once or twice a certain scorn breaks out, which 
may be held to detract from the solemn mood, as in 
the passage describing the vesting of Priapus to seem 

'^ An eligible deity," 
and there is a grim paronomasia, 

" Whose persoji or whose purse may be 
The lodestar of your reverie." 

The pathos has been sometimes held to be a literary 
pathos, but that is a wholly unjust view. The sad 
truth in all its bearings is seen with the hard lucidity 
of vision of which Rossetti had the secret; and the 
fact that the enigma seems insoluble does not argue 
any want of emotion ; it is simply cast down before 
the heart with a gesture of despair — 

" How atone, 
Great God, for this which man has done?" 

But of course the form is here the supreme thing. 



v.] VOEMS — HOUSU OF LIFE 119 

The problem is as old as life and time ; but to state 
it without affectation, without morbidity, without 
mawkishness, in words of flawless beauty and exquisite 
dignity, is what places the poem among the high 
achievements of art. What could be more absolutely 
arresting than the contrast between Jenny's childish 
thought of the great town and the reality ? — 

" Haply at times a passing thought 
Of the old days which seem to be 
Much older than any history 
That is written in any book ; 
When she would lie in fields and look 
Along the ground through the blown grass, 
And wonder where the city was, 
Far out of sight, whose broil and bale 
They told her then for a child's tale. 

Jenny, you know the city now." 

The last line of the above, in its simplicity, is pathos 
at white heat, the very essence of the world's sorrow 
distilled. 

Again, what could be truer than the image of the 

" Rose shut in a book 
In which pure women may not look. 

Yet still it keeps such faded show 
Of when 'twas gathered long ago, 
That the crushed petals' lovely grain, 
The sweetness of the sanguine stain, 
Seen of a woman's eyes, must make 
Her pitiful heart, so prone to ache. 
Love roses better for its sake." 

The last line speaks of a divine pity more than can be 
asked of human nature. 



120 ROSSETTI [chap. 

And again, what could be nobler than the rhetoric 
of the image of Lust ? — 

" Like a toad within a stone 
Seated wliile Time crumbles on ; 
Which sits there since the earth was curs'd 
For Man's transgression at the first ; 
Which, living through all centuries, 
Not once has seen the sun arise ; 
Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, 
The earth's whole summers have not warmed; 
Which always — whitherso the stone 
Be flung — sits there, deaf, blind, alone ; — 
Aye, and shall not be driven out 
Till that which shuts him round about 
Break at the very Master's stroke. 
And the dust thereof vanish as smoke. 
And the seed of Man vanish as dust : — 
Even so within this world is Lust." 

It is difficult to estimate the worth of a contem- 
porary poem, most of all a poem that is in no sense 
written virginihus imerisqxie. But apart from hysterical 
imagination, it is hard to believe that Jenny is not one 
of the monumental poems of the century that gave it 
birth. 

The history of the poem demands a few words. 
Eossetti's own account was as follows ; — " Jenny (in a 
first form) was written almost as early as Tlie Blessed 
Damozel, which I wrote (and have altered little since), 
when I was eighteen. It was first printed when I was 
twenty-one. Of the first Jenny, perhaps fifty lines 
survive here and there, but I felt it was quite beyond 
me then (a world I was then happy enough to be a 
stranger to), and later I re-wrote it completely." 

The early draft is still in existence. It contains some 



v.] TOEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 121 

of the later lines, but is characterised by a directness, 
almost coarseness, which is in strong contrast to the 
completed poem. 

One word should be said about the metre. It is of 
course the simplest iambic couplet, with here and there 
a third line added ; but out of this not very dignified 
metre, by a skilful shifting of stress, never degenerating 
into any metrical trick, a great variety of effects are 
produced. The couplet is as a rule divided at the 
end of a paragraph, so as to link in an informal way 
one strophe with the next, by keeping the ear un- 
satisfied. There is an extraordinary command of 
emphasis throughout. Such lines as 

" The many aims or the few years " 
and 

" Much older than any history " 
and 

" And the dust thereof vanish as smoke " 

are almost perfect instances of an instinct for com- 
pensation in weight of sound. Ko rules could produce 
such lines ; they are the flower of instinctive skill. 

Dante at Verona is an early poem, a very carefully 
studied picture of Dante's life in exile, in the house of 
Can Grande della Scala. It is difficult exa,ctly to 
describe it. It is some five hundred lines long, and 
is an elaborate description of the bitter life of exile, the 
humiliation, the loneliness, the upholding visions and 
the unconscious dignity of the life lived among such 
despondent conditions. The legend is very skilfully 
intertwined, but it is difficult not to feel that the 
subject is overweighted, though the poem is full of 
memorable stanzas and stately lines. It has little of 



122 KOSSETTI [chap. 

the naivete of most of Rossetti's early work, but is a 
deliberate and balanced piece of craftsmanship ; one 
feels the swift heart-beats of anger under the vigorous, 
masculine lines; the whole poem has a suppressed 
passion, a noble scorn for the petty agitations that 
made such a life possible. Shall not Florence, he 
says, yet make amends ? — 

" O God ! or shall dead souls deny 
The undying soul its prophecy ? 

Aye, 'tis their hour." 

So he moves, half sick at heart in an alien land, half 
intent on the fair vision in his soul. He is utterly 
indifferent to all the bright life around him, the 
feasting and the jesting, until his presence becomes 
"a peevish sufferance." He scorns the offer that 
comes from Florence of pardon to the exiles, if they 
will submit to fine and penance. Yet he keeps his 
other task in mind, to write worthily — 

" Yea even of her ; no rhymes uncouth 
'Twixt tongue and tongue; but by God's aid 
The first words Italy had said." 

And so he achieves the dream, though in sadness 
unutterable; till at last he turns his back upon the 
court that has become hateful to him, and goes out 
into the world again. But even Rossetti's art, thus 
intently applied, fails to make the subject wholly 
attractive. There is something ungenerous in Dante's 
scornful acceptance of hospitality, and his undisguised 
contempt for his entertainers, which remains more cur- 
mudgeonly than magnificent, in spite of all that can 
be said to make it seem natural or noble. 



v.] FO^MS — HOUSE OF LIFE 123 

A Last Confession is a story of tragic love, dramati- 
cally conceived and limpidly expressed. The incidents 
are kept very prominently in the foreground. All the 
surroundings are studied with great veracity. It is 
a story of troubled times, when a volunteer in the 
cause of liberty in the struggle between Austria and 
Italy, living a hunted life, finds and takes charge of an 
orphan child, who becomes the delight and solace of 
his life. He finds that his paternal and protective love 
gradually ripens into a passionate devotion ; while the 
simple and affectionate child meanwhile develops into 
a hard and sensual woman, and laughs at him and his 
proffered gift. In a moment which is half madness 
and half passionate impulse to save her from degra- 
dation, he stabs her to the heart. He tells the tale as he 
waits for execution. 

It is a fine story, finely told. The simplicity of the 
pure and tender-hearted patriot is very subtly de- 
veloped. But it is not a characteristic poem, though 
it shows, like other poems of the early time, the veins, 
so to speak, of unworked ore, and the mastery Rossetti 
might have achieved in dramatic narrative if he had 
developed it more diligently. 

The following extract may be quoted; — 

" For now, being always with her, the first love 
I had — the father's, brother's love — was changed, 
I think, in somewise ; like a holy thought 
Which is a prayer before one knows of it. 
The first time I perceived this, I remember, 
Was once when after hunting I came home 
Weary, and she brought food and fruit for me, 
And sat down at my feet upon the floor 
Leaning against my side. But when I felt 
Her sweet head reach from that low seat of hers 



124 KOSSETTI [chap. 

So high as to be laid upon my heart, 

I turned and looked upon my darling there 

And marked for the first time how tall she was ; 

And my heart beat with so much violence 

Under her cheek, I thought she could not choose 

But wonder at it soon and ask me why ; 

And so I bade her rise and eat with me. 

And when, remembering all and counting back 

The time, I made out fourteen years for her 

And told her so, she gazed at me with eyes 

As of the sky and sea on a grey day. 

And drew her long hands through her hair, and 

asked me 
If she was not a woman ; and then laughed : 
And as she stooped in laughing, I could see 
Beneath the growing throat the breasts half-globed 
Like folded lilies deepset in the stream." 

Tlie Portrait, which is one of the earliest works, and 
which, as has been pointed out, shows a certain trace 
of Tennyson's influence, will hold its place as one of 
the finest, if not the finest, of the strong and solid 
poems that show how Rossetti might have developed 
in the direction of simple stateliness ; — 

" This is her picture as she was : 

It seems a thing to wonder on. 
As though mine image in the glass 

Should tarry when myself am gone. 
I gaze until she seems to stir, — 
Until mine eyes almost aver 

That now, even now, the sweet lips part 

To breathe the words of the sweet heart : — 
And yet the earth is over her. 

Alas ! even such the thin-drawn ray 

That makes the prison-depths more rude, — 

The drip of water night and day 
Giving a tongue to solitude. 



v.] FOEMS — HO USB OF LIFE 125 

Yet only this, of love's whole prize, 
Remains; save what in mournful guise 
Takes counsel with my soul alone, — 
Save what is secret and unknown, 
Below the earth, above the skies." 

The natural touches in the poem are conceived with 
perfect simplicity — 

" When the leaf-shadows at a breath 
Shrink in the road, and all the heath, 

Forest and water, far and wide, 

In limpid starlight glorified. 
Lie like the mystery of death." 

If I had to select one poem of Rossetti's to illustrate 
the early simple manner at its very best, I should 
certainly choose TJie Portrait. Here is nothing volup-, 
tuous, nothing extravagant. Stanza by stanza the 
sweet music goes its way, rising at the end into a 
tender and divine close. 

The Ave is another of these austere and restrained 
poems, like a strain of religious music. He adopts 
Catholic dogma, and places the Blessed Virgin on 
the very throne of heaven — 

" Oh when our need is uttermost, 
Think that to such as death may strike 
Thou once wert sister sisterlike ! " 

The description of the Annunciation Day is very 
tenderly drawn — 

" Mind'st thou not (when June's heavy breath 
Warmed the long days in Nazareth,) 
That eve thou didst go forth to give 
Thy flowers some drink that they might live 
One faint night more amid the sands? 
Far off the trees were as pale wands 



126 KOSSETTI [chap. 

Against the fervid sky : the sea 
Sighed further off eternally 
As human sorrow sighs in sleep. 
Then suddenly the awe grew deep, 
As of a day to which all days 
Were footsteps in God's secret ways : 
Until a folding sense, like prayer, 
Which is, as God is, everywhere, 
Gathered about thee ; and a voice 
Spake to thee without any noise, 
Being of the silence : — ' Hail,' it said, 
' Thou that art highly favoured ; 
The Lord is with thee here and now ; 
Blessed among all women thou.' " 

And again — 

" Mind'st thou not (when the twilight gone 
Left darkness in the house of John,) 
Between the naked window-bars 
That spacious vigil of the stars ? " 

The whole poem lias an exquisite progress, like a 
flowing stream. 

The Burden of Nineveh was written about 1850. 
It appeared in its original form in the Oxford and 
Cambridge Magaziyie. Ruskin on reading it wrote to 
Rossetti : " I am wild to know who is the author of 
The Burden of Nineveh, mis o. %. . . . It is glorious." 

Euskin's next letter contains the word Bravo ! writ- 
ten very large and shaped out of notes of admiration, 
and no doubt refers to Rossetti's avowal of authorship. 

The subject is the arrival of a sculptured beast from 
the excavations at Nineveh at the British Museum, and 
the thought of all the vicissitudes it has endured. 

It is, as it stands, a noble poem full of strong 



v.] POEMS — //0£7;S^ OF LIFE 127 

imagery and allusion, and thrilling with light and 
sound. Perhaps the finest of many fine stanzas is 

" Oh when upon each sculptured court, 
Where even the wind might not resort, — 
O'er which Time passed, of like import 
With the wild Arab boys at sport, — 

A living face looked in to see : — 
Oh seemed it not — the spell once broke — 
As though the carveu warriors woke. 
As though the shaft the sti'ing forsook. 
The cymbals clashed, the chariots shook, 

And there was life in Nineveh ? " 

The metre, as will be seen, is one that imposes a great 
strain on the invention of rhyme. But there is a 
splendid verve and rush all through, that speaks of a 
living fountain of imagination and language springing 
loudly from an echoing spring. 

A few of the lyrics may now be considered. First 
perhaps of all comes The Stream's Secret, a long lyric, 
with a peculiar and delicate music of its own, which 
has caught the very cadence of water, lapsing and 
murmuring, with many an eddy, many a backward 
gush, turning still upon itself, and swayed this way 
and that, meeting the very obstacles that would stay 
it with a soft and yielding evasion, and yet speeding 
resistlessly upon its way. The lyric was for the most 
part written in a little cave beside the stream, and 
the very spirit of the flood has passed into these 
strange and musical lines ; — 

" What thing unto mine ear 
Wouldst thou convey, — what secret thing, 
O wandering water ever whispering? 

Surely thy speech shall be of her. 
Thou water, O thou whispering wanderer, 
What message dost thou bring? 



128 ROSSETTI [chap. 

Say, hath not Love leaned low 
This hour beside thy far well-head, 
And there through jealous hollowed fingers said 
The thing that most I long to know ? " 

It is of Love that he makes question, love that seems 
to have taken wing — 

" But she is far away 
Now ; nor the hours of night grown hoar 
Bring yet to me, long gazing from the door, 

The wind-stirred robe of roseate grey 
And rose-crown of the hour that leads the day 
When we shall meet once more." 

The stream flows on, guarding the secret that it 
seems fain to utter. The stanza in which he speaks 
the very secret of the heart, his restless imperious 
quest of love, runs thus ; — 

" But hear, before thou speak 1 
Withhold, I pray, the vain behest 
That while the maze hath still its bower for quest 

My burning heart should cease to seek. 
Be sure that Love ordained for souls more meek 
His roadside dells of rest." 

Another of the poems that seems to hover on the 
verge of sleep, in a dreamful land, is the beautiful 
lyric Insomnia, with its soft burden — 

" Thin are the night-skirts left behind 
By daybreak hours that onward creep, 
And thin, alas ! the shred of sleep 
That wavers with the spirit's wind : 
But in half-dreams that shift and roll 

And still remember and forget, 
My soul this hour has drawn your soul 
A little nearer yet." 



v.] TOEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 120 

One of tlie lightest and most musical of the lesser 
lyrics is the beautiful Love-Lily, which has a delicate 
lilt given it by the light rhyme of the word Love-Lily 
■which in each stanza ends the second line ; — 

" Within the voice, within the heart, 
Within the mind of Love-Lily, 

A spirit is born who lifts apart 
His tremulous wings and looks at me; 
Who on my mouth his finger lays, 

And shows, while whispering lutes confer, 
That Eden of Love's watered ways 

Whose winds and spirits worship her." 

But the poem is particularly notable for the gnomic 
couplet at the end, already quoted, which, more than 
any other compressed phrase, sums up Rossetti's whole 
philosophy of love — 

"Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought 
Nor Love her body from her soul." 

It has been rightly said that the title of Rossetti's 
great sonnet-sequence. The House of Life, is too catholic 
in its import. It is rather the House of Love ; but 
the title is significant, because it shows the place that 
Love held in Rossetti's philosophy, and proves clearly 
enough that for him love was the all-embracing secret 
and mystery of life. It is divided into two sections. 
The first fifty-nine sonnets are Youth and Change; 
the last, Lx.-ci., are Change and Fate. The struc- 
ture varies to a certain extent. The octaves are 
mostly built on the same scheme of two rhymes 
(A, B, B, A, A, B, B, A). But the sestettes are varied. 
Some are constructed out of two rhymes, some of 
three, arranged in a great diversity of order. This 
variety of form Rossetti considered to be not only 



130 ROSSETTI [chap. 

permissible but desirable ; he did not consider tbat 
what is commonly called the Petrarchan form was 
at all binding. He once wrote : " The English sonnet 
too much tampered with becomes a sort of bastard 
madrigal. Too much, invariably restricted, it degen- 
erates into a Shibboleth." 

The House of Life is not constructed on a definite 
plan : the mss., which I have carefully studied, bear 
witness to the perpetual alterations and rearrange- 
ments which took place before the eventual publication, 
and reveal how hard a task it was for Rossetti to satisfy 
himself. The sequence contains some of his earliest 
work and some of his latest ; but it is in effect a sort of 
commentary on life as Eossetti conceived it, and there 
is a certain evolution of experience throughout. It 
opens in hope and youth ; then death strikes sternly 
through the sweet dream and shatters the vase of life ; 
then the fragments are, so to speak, pieced together in 
sadness and despair, but the glimmer of hope grows 
stronger until patience, if not tranquillity, is attained. 

This evolution may, however, enable us to trace, in 
so far as anything so mystical and subtle may be 
apprehended and stated, Rossetti's own philosophy of 
life. The creed is enunciated in the first of the 
sonnets. Love Enthroned ; — 

" I marked all kindred Powers the heart finds fair : — 
Truth, with awed lips; and Hope, with eyes upcast; 
Aud Fame, whose loud wings fan the ashen Past 

To signal-fires, Oblivion's flight to scare ; 

And Youth, with still some single golden hair 
Unto his shoulder clinging, since the last 
Embrace wherein two sweet arms held him fast; 

And Life, still wreathing flowers for Death to wear. 

Love's throne was not with these; " 



v.] :P0EMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 131 

He sits far apart — 

" Though Truth foreknow Love's heart, and Hope foretell, 
And Fame be for Love's sake desirable, 
And Youth be dear, and Life be sweet to Love." 

Love, then, is the supreme secret, lord of all the 
powers of heart and mind and soul. 

This love is inextricably intertwined with beauty. 
Though it may exist independently, beauty is the 
actual and visible symbol of the secret. This is 
clearly stated in Ixxvii., Soul's Beauty; — 

" Under the arch of Life, where love and death, 
Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw 
Beauty enthroned ; and though her gaze struck awe, 
I drew it in as simply as my breath." 

In the light of this secret all things are to be inter- 
preted, and the soul is therethrough, as from a secret 
window, to look out upon the unknown land. 

This love, too, is not a sudden thing, which might or 
might not have been, depending upon mortal chances 
of vicinity and time ; it is deeper and older, as old as 
the earth and as deep as the far-off purposes of God 
{TJie Birth-bond, xv.) — 

" Even so, when first I saw you, seemed it, love, 
That among souls allied to mine was yet 

One nearer kindred than life hinted of. 

O born with me somewhere that men forget. 
And though in years of sight and sound unmet. 

Known for my soul's birth-partner well enough I " 

The truth is known in a moment, and perceived by 
both hearts (Love-Sweetness, xxi.) — 

" the swift beat 
And soft subsidence of the spirit's wing. 
Then when it feels, in cloiid-girt wayfaring 
The breath of kindred plumes against its feet." 



132 ROSSETTI [chap. 

But the lover must not, as the rapture grows, lose 
sight of his insignificance — 

" Lo ! what am I to Love, the lord of all? 

One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand, — 
One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand." 

Then the shadow falls. The beloved face rises in the 
spring of Willowwood, rises and sinks again — 

" and if it ever may- 
Meet mine again I know not if Love knows." 

Then follows Without Her (liii.), a sacred poem, 
drawn from Kossetti in an hour of ghastly solitude, in 
the days when the hinge of his life turned swiftly. 
When the passionate sorrow has a little died away. 
Love gives the singer a glistening leaf, saying (lix.) : — 

"Only this laurel dreads no winter days: 
Take my last gift ; thy heart hath sung my praise." 

Then the mood changes, and the harder, graver 
experiences of life flow in upon the desolate soul. 
The spirit counts its treasures up, and garners the 
worth of life, sometimes hopeful, sometimes sad, 
whether it sees (Ixii.) 

" Visions of golden futures : or that last 
Wild pageant of the accumulated past 
That clangs and flashes for a drowning man." 

There are dark days (Ixviii.) — 

" The gloom that breathes upon me with these airs 
Is like the drops which strike the traveller's brow 
Who knows not, darkling, if they bring him now 
Fresh storm, or be old rain the covert bears." 

Nature and Art are ransacked for their secrets ; but 



v.] TOBM.S — HOUSE OF LIFE 133 

behind them all flies a dark shadow of mystery for the 
lonely soul. The spirit grows bewildered, looking 
back, and wonders what all the strange wanderings 
signify (Ixxx.) — 

" Even so the thought that is at length full grown 
Turns back to note the sun-smit paths, all grey 

And marvellous once, where first it walked alone ; 
And haply doubts, amid the unblenching day, 
Which most or least impelled its onward way, — 

Those unknown things or these things overknown." 

There breaks upon the heart the sense that it too must 
make its farewells and be gone, that the cup is drunk 
out and the life lived. He turns away from the glen 
he has loved (Ixxxiv.) — 

" And yet, farewell ! For better shalt thou fare 

When children bathe sweet faces in thy flow 

And happy lovers blend sweet shadows there 

In hours to come, than when an hour ago 

Thine echoes had but one man's sighs to bear 

And thy trees whispered what he feared to know." 

Remorse for lost days falls upon him. In one of the 
noblest of the sonnets, regarded by himself as one 
of his highest achievements, he writes (Lost Days, 
Ixxxvi.) — 

" The lost days of my life until to-day, 

What were they, could I see them on the street 
Lie as they fell ? Would they be ears of wheat 

Sown once for food but trodden into clay ? 

Or golden coins squandered and still to pay? 
Or drops of blood dabbUng the guilty feet? 
Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat 

The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway ? " 



134 EOSSETTI [chap. 

He will see them, he knows, and hear them each 
speak — 

" ' I am thyself, — what hast thou done to me ?' 
'And I — and I — thyself,' (lo! each one saith,) 
' And thou thyself to all eternity ! ' " 

The spirit cowers in the shadow of death, and (xciii.) 

" Then sends one sigh forth to the unknown goal, 
And bitterly feels breathe against his soul 
The hour swift-winged of nearer nothingness." 

The " shaken shadow intolerable " speaks (xcvii.) — 

" ' Look in my face ; my name is Might-have-been, 
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.' " 

But as the spirit learns its lesson of patience the mood 
changes (xcix.) — 

" ' To-day Death seems to me an infant child 
Which her worn mother Life upon my knee 
Has set to grow my friend and play with me.' " 

And then, all at once, like a sad music gathering 
itself up, and dying on one sweet, solemn, and joyful 
chord, the One Hope steals upon the heart — 

" ' When vain desire at last and vain regret 
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain, 
What shall assuage the unforgotten pain 
And teach the unforgetful to forget ? 

Ah ! when the wan soul in that golden air 
Between the scriptured petals softly blown 
Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown, — 
Ah 1 let none other alien spell soe'er 
But only the one Hope's one name be there, — 
Not less nor more, but even that word alone.' " 



v.] TOEMS — BOUSE OF LIFE 135 

So closes this strange, sad book of tlie heart's ex- 
perience. The impression that it leaves upon the 
mind and spirit is one that it is difficult even to at- 
tempt to analyse. It is wellnigh impossible not to 
fall under the almost magical spell of the long-drawn, 
solemn beauty of the words. Of course it is tran- 
scendental, spun of light and dew ; and for those who 
admit no further depth in love and life than material 
rapture, delicate sensations, and sensuous excitement, 
it is doubtless merely bewildering and over-strained. 

It is true that in many of the sonnets there is a cer- 
tain weary fever of the body, a passionate voluptuous- 
ness which offends and must offend the temperate and 
controlled spirit. 

But that is not all ; other poets, such as Shakespeare, 
Milton, Keats, and Browning, have been voluptuous 
enough without offending. In Rossetti, what offends 
is a certain softness of execution, but more a want of 
reserve, which makes him appear at times as if over- 
mastered by a kind of sensuous hysteria. The poets 
mentioned above have been plain-spoken enough on 
the subject of love without offending, because they 
have spoken as it were boldly and unashamedly. But 
there are moments when one fears, as it were, to catch 
Eossetti's eye, when there is a lack not only of dignity 
but of decorum. 

Further, it is interesting to contrast this note with 
the note of self-sacrifice, the deliberate, almost ecstatic, 
turning of the back on material pleasure that runs so 
strongly through all his sister Christina's work. In his 
own, there is a languid surrender to the physical joys 
of love which seems to have within it a taint, as though 
love were a spirit bound by laws of beauty only, and non- 



136 ROSSETTI [chap. 

existent beside them. But the largeness of the message 
of love for humanity is that it may triumph completely 
over all that is voluptuous and seductive, and that in that 
purer air his wings beat more urgently and radiantly, 
and lift the soul to a height of nobleness and sacrifice 
vrhich seems undreamed of in the House of Life. 

Thus it is that the book has an enervating effect 
upon the spirit. It seems shuttered close in a fragrant 
gloom of strange perfumes which have a perilous and 
magical sweetness about them. But one longs for 
something more simple and natural, a breath of fresh 
woods, or the falling of some sharp and cold wave, with 
brisk and briny savours. One longs to come out into 
a place of liberty from this fallen light, this hushed 
and perfumed chamber. 

This feeling is heightened, in reading the House of 
Life, by the incorporation of some of the earlier work 
into the sequence. These more immature sonnets, 
even when one feels that the mastery of word and 
technique is less complete, are like spaces of sunlight 
in a forest. Elaboration and gorgeousness are not 
inconsistent with freshness of conception ; but it is 
impossible not to feel that there is a certain brightness 
as of morning light, a temperamental thing, which is 
absent from some of the most finished structures of 
Rossetti's later manner. One asks oneself uneasily 
whether these latter are not rather art than poetry, 
appealing rather to the mind, and the cultivated sense, 
than to the primal delight in things of beauty, raptur- 
ously and suddenly apprehended. The impressions 
are not clearly and freshly seen, but veil themselves 
dimly under heavy ornate fabrics, beneath which the 
outline tends to disappear. The initial impulse seems 



v.] POEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 137 

weaker, the outlook more conventional. Magnificence 
of manner has taken the place of a wondering delight. 

Still, as a literary work it is a treasure-house of 
incomparable richness. The splendour of the noble, 
resonant lines, the music of the slow-moving verse, 
the stateliness of conception, the perfect progression 
and balance of sonnet after sonnet — all these are 
there. Many of these noble phrases dwell and re-echo 
in the mind. Yet I would say that there must be a 
certain sense of revolt against the overpowering seduc- 
tiveness of thought and music ; they are like the song 
of the sirens above the bone-strewn strand, and can 
only be safely heard by the wary, much-enduring hero, 
with limbs bound close to the mast. Or they are as 
the enchanted house of Circe, and may be gazed upon 
with delight and fearless joy, if only the gazer carry 
the holy herb in his bosom, against which the magical 
spells beat in vain. 

Of the sonnets outside the House of Life there are 
three distinct classes : — The early sonnets in the Pre- 
Eaphaelite manner ; Sonnets in the later manner ; 
Literary sonnets, which form a class apart ; and apart 
from these stand two sonnets. Winter and Spring, which 
are beautiful transcripts of Nature. 

The early sonnets are among the most beautiful of 
Rossetti's work. To these belongs A Venetian Pastoral, 
discussed elsewhere. This was much strengthened and 
improved at a later date. Manfs GirUiood, which is 
characterised by the most perfect and daring simplic- 
ity ; such lines as — 

" Unto God's will she brought devout respect. 
Profound simplicity of intellect, 
And supreme patience " 



138 EOSSETTI [chap. 

apart from their setting, seem almost too naive for 
art ; but Rossetti never wrote sweeter lines than — 

"An an gel- watered lily, that near God 
Grows and is quiet." 

Of the second class are such careful sonnets as Venus 
Verticordia and Pandora ; but such phrases in the lat- 
ter as " the Olympian consistory " and 

" Powers of the impassioned hours prohibited," 

are instances of Rossetti's instinct to carry linguistic 
elaboration beyond the bounds of beauty. 

Of the third class, — the literary sonnets, — those on 
Chatterton and Shelley seem almost too rhetorical ; 
yet they show a great intellectual skill in seizing 
salient points. Those on Coleridge and Keats are 
majestic, especially the end of the latter. 

" thy name, not writ 
But rumour'd in water, while the fame of it 
Along Time's flood goes echoing evermore," 

has a wonderful liquid beat, very close to the image it 
employs. 

The two nature-sonnets, Spring and Winter, are both 
delicate pieces of observation, and show what Rossetti 
might have done in this manner had he had more such 
material to work upon. Such a line as 

" The young rooks cheep 'mid the thick caw o' the old," 

is a microscopic touch of tender observation. 
And again, in the Winter sonnet ; — 



v.] POEMS — 7/0 ra^ OF LIFE 139 

" How large that thrush looks on the bare thorn-tree ! 
A swarm of such, three little months ago, 
Had hidden in the leaves and let none know 

Save by the outburst of their minstrelsy." 



The more that we consider where Kossetti stands in 
relation to the literature of the century, the more 
lonely and esoteric his position will appear. We shall 
feel that he stands like a tree transplanted from some 
foreign soil, which though by some liappy accident of 
soil and air and sun it shot out great branched glories, 
soft layers of shade, yet remains essentially exotic, a 
tree, so to speak, of a pleasaunce, wdth no congruity 
with the wild harmony of the native woodland. Com- 
pare him with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, 
and Byron ; with Keats, Clough, Browning, Arnold, 
and Tennyson — the great names of the era. With 
the casuistical melancholy of Clough and his broken 
cadences he has no affinity at all, and hardly more 
with the Greek purity, the austere restraint, of Arnold. 
With Browning he had more in common ; yet the 
kinship is but a superficial thing. Indeed if the cir- 
cumstances of the lives of the two poets were detailed 
and the works of the pair were put unnamed into the 
hands of a critical reader, he would probably think 
that he detected in Browning's hankering instinct 
after Italy and Southern skies the home-sickness of a 
Neapolitan for the land of his forefathers ; while in 
Kossetti's ballads he might trace an ancestral attach- 
ment to the romance of the Celt, to moorland country 
with its babbling streams overlooked from a grey 
castle keep. There is no deep resemblance between the 
two ; indeed, the catholicity of Browning's humanity. 



140 ROSSETTI [chap. 

the zest for touching, tasting, and feeling life at all 
points, the irresistible desire to see every one's point of 
view from the inside, is the strongest contrast that can 
be conceived to Kossetti's deliberate selection of certain 
experiences, and his jealous exclusion of all phenomena 
that did not march with his taste. 

With Tennyson there is a nearer bond, for Tennyson, 
like Rossetti, tended to live in a world of his own 
devising ; and there are certain of Tennyson's poems 
that bear a decided affinity to the work of Rossetti. 
There is the fidelity to detail, the strong power of 
realising pictorially the romantic surroundings of a 
scene ; both, too, have the power of vividly presenting 
a situation from a single point of view, and the weak- 
ness in grasping the dramatic significance of the inter- 
play of varied character. But Tennyson has more 
catholicity, more serenity, more philosophical curi- 
osity ; he had an intense desire to solve the riddle of the 
" painful earth," while Eossetti had an overpowering 
desire to escape from it into the region of immediate 
sensation. 

Rossetti had none of the impulse "to see life steadily 
and to see it whole " ; he rather desired to live in the 
intensity of the instant, to lose himself in the emotional 
crisis, the beautiful adjuncts of the picture. 

To pass, then, from his contemporaries to the earlier 
names of the century. Scott would have appeared to 
Rossetti, in poetry, a mere loose narrator, lost in the 
childish pleasure of a tale, but without concentration, 
and without the ecstatic sense of sudden beauty. 
Wordsworth seemed to him a rustical proser, without 
dignity of conception or execution; Byron a gifted 
amateur. In Shelley he found a superabundance of 



v.] TOEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 141 

unreal philanthropy, and a lyrical beauty which came, 
as it were, by a rhapsodical accident, without intention 
and without artistic devotion. 

There remain the names of Coleridge and Keats, to 
whom in spiritual ancestry Rossetti was the nearest. 
In Coleridge he saw a genius overpowered by indolence 
and vapid philosophy ; but the Ancient Mariner and 
Christahel had no doubt a directly inspiring effect upon 
E-ossetti's mode of conception and execution. In these 
poems there is the same romantic isolation ; their scene 
is laid beyond the faery casement, on the perilous seas 
forlorn, and in the enchanted woodland of the land of 
dreams. To Keats Rossetti owed a true allegiance : 
there is the same richness of fancy, the same volup- 
tuousness of mood, the same deliberate intention of 
wringing beauty out of the moment and the scene. 
But Keats is a truer because a larger poet ; and there 
are regions into which Rossetti could rarely follow him, 
where Keats came face to face with the pathos of the 
"world, and saw that it was good ; where he saw with- 
out rebellion, and in the higher, more prophetic mood, 
the sadness of all sweet things that have an end. 

It is in this absence of detachment that Rossetti 
goes nearest to forfeiting his claim to be considered a 
poet of the first rank. There is a haunting sense of 
the desire of possession about much of his poetry, 
particularly in the later years. From his best work 
it is absent ; but only in his best work does one lose 
sight of the personality of the poet ; and if his per- 
ception of beauty had not been so acute, and his power 
of expression so magical, it would have had the effect 
of marring much of his work. 

If he stands apart from his predecessors, so does he 



142 ROSSETTI [chap. 

stand apart from his successors. He cannot be said to 
have modified in any direct way the great stream of 
English poetry. The poets whom he profoundly 
affected have been of a secondary order, poets who 
have been more concerned with the manner than the 
matter of their verse. 

Indeed, we can easily imagine that a man of high 
poetical impulse would tend to shun the writings of 
Rossetti rather than become familiar with them, just 
as his friends tended to draw apart in a spirit of revolt 
from the mental domination of the man. So it was 
that Stevenson, we are told, would not read Livy, and 
Pater would not read Stevenson, because of the con- 
sciousness that these contagious stylists tended to draw 
them away from their own mode of expression in a 
kind of insensible imitation. 

Thus with Eossetti, his effects are so gorgeous, so 
individual, so definitely mannerised; the technical 
perfection is so supreme, that it is difficult, if one falls 
under the spell of Rossetti, not to follow in the track 
of what has been so excellently done. And therefore 
the school of Rossetti has been thronged rather by 
the poetasters who desired to write rather than by the 
poets who have been constrained to sing. 

In one important direction did he and his sister 
Christina and Mr. Swinburne, who may be held to 
have been the heads of the school, modify the literary 
art of the time. They effected a reformation in 
language. Poetry had fallen under the influence of 
Tennyson in an almost helpless fashion. Tennyson had 
himself lost his first virginal freshness, and in the Idylls, 
and still more in the Enoch Arden volume, was tend- 
ing to produce a certain empty form of blank verse, 



v.] TOTEMS — HOUSE OF LIFE 143 

melodious indeed, and sweet as honey, but still con- 
ventional and tame. Poets like Lord Lytton and 
Coventry Patmore (though he later recovered, or rather 
won, a noble originality), had possessed themselves of 
the seed, and were able to grow the flower in luxuriant 
profusion. They could turn out glowing verse, but 
verse which was soft, mild, amiable, with a certain 
taint of thought which may be described as priggish 
and parochial. 

Rossetti, Christina Eossetti, and Mr. Swinburne 
struck boldly across the path, leaving a trail of fire. 
They were not so much rebellious, but they did again 
what Tennyson had done in his early prime. They 
dared to use simple and direct words, which they 
infused with new and audacious charm; there was 
nothing didactic about them ; they went straight to 
the source of pure beauty ; they re-charged, so to 
speak, homely and direct expressions with the very 
element of poetical vigour. 

Even Christina Eossetti, deeply religious as she is, 
had little ethical about her. She enjoyed her faith, 
if I may use the expression, with all the rapture of a 
mediaeval saint; she visualised her dreams without 
timidity, and spoke her thoughts, not because they 
were improving, but because they were beautiful. 

But in all this Eossetti was the leader; and this 
process of breaking up a dominant tradition, which 
requires to be done at frequent intervals, and which is 
done when art is really alive, reacted on Tennyson 
himself, and gave a new impulse to the stream of 
English poetry. 

And so it may be said that his influence on poetry, 
like his influence on art, has been of a general rather 



144 EOSSETTI [chap. v. 

than of a direct kind. He has stimulated the sense of 
beauty, the desire to extract the very essence of 
delight from emotion, and form, and colour; he has 
inculcated devotion to art, and profound intention, and 
deliberate isolation ; but the- upshot is that he stands 
alone, in a fever of sense and spirit, a figure clasping 
its hands in a poignancy of agitation, and rather over- 
shadowed by the doom of art than crowned with its 
laurels. 



CHAPTER VI 

TRANSLATIONS PROSE — LETTERS 

EossETTi's translations from the Early Italian Poets, 
together with the Vita Nuova of Dante, published in 
1861, is a book of greater interest when considered 
in reference to the history of Rossetti's mind than as a 
literary performance. Popular it could never be. The 
whole frame of mind, the elaborate passion with its 
hot and cold fits, the feverish sensibility of the writers, 
the underlying thought that the passion of love is at 
once the guiding light and the business of life, — all 
this is very alien to the calmer English spirit, to 
which courtship is a time of inexplicable and gracious 
romance indeed, but takes its place in later life as a 
marvellous episode, enshrined in memory, the troubled 
entrance to a calm haven. 

It is only too clear how congenial the atmosphere 
was to Rossetti, because the patient labour involved in 
the task is fairly marvellous to contemplate. The 
verse-translations occupy nearly four hundred pages 
of his collected works, and the Vita Nuova some sixty 
more. It is evident where Rossetti gained his rich 
vocabulary, his command of rhyme, his inexhaustible 
store of grave and dignified language. And, further, 
it is plain that the minute examination of archaic 
L 145 



146 KOSSETTI [chap. 

Italian models exercised an extraordinary influence in 
the evolution of his own style. 

An interesting preface, written in strong and ner- 
vous prose, is prefixed to the book in which Rossetti 
writes that " these i^oems possess, in their degree, beau- 
ties of a kind which can never again exist in art. . . . 
Nothing but a strong impression, first of their poetic 
value, and next of the biographical interest of some of 
them, . . . would have inclined me to bestow the time 
and trouble which have resulted in this collection." 

In a very striking and valuable passage, Eossetti 
lays down firmly, and with real insight, the general 
principles of translation : — 

"The life-blood of rhythmical translation is this 
commandment, — that a good poem shall not be turned 
into a bad one. The only true motive for putting 
poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh 
nation, as far as possible, with one more possession of 
beauty. Poetry not being an exact science, literality 
of rendering is altogether secondary to this chief law. 
I say literality, — not fidelity, which is by no means the 
same thing. When literality can be combined with 
what is thus the primary condition of success, the 
translator is fortunate, and must strive his utmost to 
unite them ; when such object can only be attained 
by paraphrase, that is his only path." 

There follows a fine section which describes the diffi- 
culties and despairs of the translator ; the obstacles 
of rhyme, the need to sacrifice his own taste in the 
matter of idiom, cadence, and structure : — 

"Now he would slight the matter for the music, 
and now the music for the matter; but no, — he must 
deal to each alike. Sometimes too a flaw in the work 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 147 

galls him, and he would fain remove it, doing for the 
poet that which his age denied him ; but no, — it is not 
in the bond. His path is like that of Aladdin through 
the enchanted vaults : many are the precious fruits 
and flowers which he must pass by unheeded in search 
for the lamp alone ; happy if at last, when brought to 
light, it does not prove that his old lamp has been 
exchanged for a new one, — glittering indeed to the eye, 
but scarcely of the same virtue nor with the same 
genius at its summons." 

The preface ends with a fine metaphor, conveying 
a rebuke under the form of a dignified apology : — 
" I know that there is no great stir to be made by 
launching afresh, on high-seas busy with new traffic, 
the ships which have been long out-stripped and the 
ensigns which are grown strange." 

The book also contains a carefully written Introduc- 
tion, giving some biographical particulars about the 
authors of the poems. Rossetti writes first of the im- 
portance of the Vita Nuova to all who would fully com- 
prehend the Commedia. " It is only from the perusal of 
its earliest and then undivulged self-communings that 
we can divine the whole bitterness of wrong to such 
a soul as Dante's, its poignant sense of abandonment, or 
its deep and jealous refuge in memory.''^ . . . "Through- 
out the Vita Nuova there is a strain like the first falling 
murmur which reaches the ear in some remote meadow, 
and prepares us to look upon the sea." 

Once or twice in the Introduction a certain fierceness 
breaks out against the over-interpretation of these 
poems. Speaking of a canzone of Guido Cavalcanti's, 
he writes : — 

"A love-song which acts as such a fly-catcher for 



148 ROSSETTI [chap. 

priests and pedants looks very suspicious ; and accord- 
ingly, on examination, it proves to be a poem beside 
the purpose of poetry, filled with metaphysical jargon, 
and perhaps the very worst of Guido's productions." 

This impatience of pedantry, " as beside the purpose 
of poetry,^'' manifests itself strongly at the end of the 
Introduction. "Among the severely edited books," 
he writes, " which had to be consulted in forming 
this collection, I have often suffered keenly from the 
buttonholders of learned Italy, who will not let one 
go on one's way; and have contracted a horror of 
those editions where the text, hampered with numerals 
for reference, struggles through a few lines at the top 
of the page only to stick fast at the bottom in a slough 
of verbal analysis. It would seem unpardonable to 
make a book which should be even as these." 

He adds that he fears the Introduction will form 
"an awkward intermezzo" to the volume, but that 
it is necessary, " that so the reader may not find him- 
self perpetually worried with footnotes during the 
consideration of something which may require a little 
peace. The glare of too many tapers is apt to render 
the altar-picture confused and inharmonious, even 
when their smoke does not obscure or deface it." 

These extracts serve not only to show the purpose 
in Rossetti's mind in making the book, but illustrate 
very forcibly both the soundness and sanity of his 
criticism, and his strong, vigorous, and dignified prose. 
There is no preciosity of phrase ; in homely and 
vigorous English he speaks out his thought, in lucid 
form and sternly compressed ; while the little similes 
which light up the argument are like springs that 
break out beside a straight white road. 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 149 

The qualities displayed by the translations are 
directness and dignity. It was natural that Kossetti, 
of all poets the most self-willed, should move some- 
what stiffly in the thoughts of others. Still his 
sympathy with both the associations and the mood of 
the poems was so vivid and intimate that it carried 
him safely through, the ordeal. 

Perhaps the poems where there is a wealth of 
brilliant images are those that most readily lend 
themselves to quotation. What could be more rich 
and delicate than the following sonnet from Guido 
Cavalcanti ? — 

" Beauty in woman ; the high will's decree ; 

Fair knighthood armed for manly exercise ; 

The pleasant song of birds; love's soft replies; 
The strength of rapid ships upon the sea; 
The serene air when light begins to be ; 

The white snow, without wind that falls and lies ; 

Fields of all flower ; the place where waters rise ; 
Silver and gold ; azure in jewellery " — 

all of which bright and solemn things he weighs 

against 

" the sweet and quiet worth 

Which my dear lady cherishes at heart," 

and finds them wanting. 

Here again is a picture, from a ballad of Guido 
Cavalcanti's, with a picture just such as Eossetti 
might himself have conceived and painted — 

" Within a copse I met a shepherd-maid. 
More fair, I said, than any star to see. 

She came with waving tresses pale and bright, 
With rosy cheer, and loving eyes of flame, 

Guiding the lambs beneath her wand aright. 
Her naked feet still had the dews on tliem, 
As, singing like a lover, so she came ; 

Joyful, and fashioned for all ecstasy." 



150 ROSSETTI [chap. 

Then in the didactic or philosophical sonnet we see 
the sober gravity in which he could move. In the 
sonnet by Enzo, King of Sardinia, on the Fitness of 
Seasons, after the octette which speaks of contrasted 
occasions, 

"... a time to talk, and hold thy peace ; 
A time to labour, and a time to cease," 

the conclusion of the matter runs — 

" Wherefore I hold him well-advised and sage 
Who evermore keeps prudence facing him, 
And lets his life slide with occasion ; 
And so comports himself, through youth to age, 
That never any man at any time 
Can say. Not thus, but thus thou shouldst have done." 

Or for perfect simplicity and loveliness consider the 
three stanzas from The Young Girl, a lyric by Niccolo 
Tommaseo, the brilliant Dalmatian poet, who died in 
1874 — 

" As in a gilded room 

Shines 'mid the braveries 
Some wild-flower, by the bloom 

Of its delicate quietness 

Recalling the forest-trees 
In whose shadow it was, 
And the water and the green grass : — 



Let the proud river-course, 

That shakes its mane and champs, 

Run between marble shores 
By the light of many lamps. 
While all the ooze and the damps 

Of the city's choked-uj) ways 

Make it their draining-place. 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 151 

Rather the little stream 

For me ; which, hardly heard, 

Unto the flower, its friend, 
Whispers as with a word. 
The timid journeying bird 

Of the pure drink that flows 

Takes but one drop, and goes." 

The above poem may indeed be cited as an almost 
supreme instance of translation, where the outline, 
traced as it were above the gracious original, with 
absolute transparency of phrase, as Pater says, be- 
comes a poem, which, like a quiet room seen in a 
mirror, gains a beauty and a mystery of its own. 

The Vita Nuova in Rossetti's rendering has a 
dignified and archaic precision, but it is impossible to 
give any conception of its beauty by brief extracts. 
The style of the English Bible is generally followed, 
though the vocabulary is not strictly Biblical; but it will 
also be clear how easily the translator moves under the 
" excellent adjusted folds," and how complete a mastery 
he had over the vehicle of austere and lucid prose. 

In point of fidelity to the spirit of his original, 
Rossetti's translations of the poems in the Vita Nuova 
probably surpass most other metrical renderings in our 
language, whether of Dante or any other poet. This 
was no more than was to have been expected, con- 
sidering that his father's mystical bent had steeped 
his childhood in the Dantesque atmosphere, and that 
Italian was almost a mother tongue to him. 

There are, however, more departures from the literal 
meaning of the original than would have been expected 
with Rossetti's genius and special advantages, and the 
very great pains he is known to have bestowed upon his 



152 KOSSETTI [chap. 

work. These aberrations are almost always traceable 
to the endeavour to escape from difficulties, which is 
usually accomplished either by interpolating something 
not in the original, or by more or less deflecting Dante's 
meaning to bring in the rhyme desired by the translator. 

Compared, nevertheless, with the liberties taken by 
other translators, Eossetti's licences seem venial ; and 
if he sometimes introduces a thought or phrase not 
strictly warranted by his original, it is so fine as almost 
to appear an improvement upon it. I do not think 
he had any motive except to elude verbal difficulties ; 
but the general tendency of his variations is, so to 
speak, to screw Dante's note up a little higher. 

Yet after all, though Rossetti is hardly so exact 
as he might have been if he had kept verbal accuracy 
more strictly before him, or revised his work with a 
special view to this object, when he is literal, he is 
literal with a delicacy and vividness that no other 
translator approaches, and makes one almost feel that 
Dante's own expression would have followed the same 
bias, if Dante had been writing in English. 

In reading Rossetti's original prose writings, one is 
tempted to regret that he did not write more prose. 
He had a strong sense of balance and proportion, a vivid 
descriptive gift, and a very rich vocabulary. There 
was a certain largeness and prodigality of thought and 
language within him, which was thwarted and confined 
by the selective process of poetry, and which might 
have been nobly and freely employed outside the 
fashioning of those small jewelled sonnets. But prose 
was alien to his disposition. His mind and tempera- 
ment demanded something more distinctive, deliberate, 
remote, formal — the precise embodiment of dreams. 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 153 

He wrote as lie painted, in a sort of solemn stateli- 
ness, building up, touch by touch, a picture or a poem. 
Magnificence and gorgeousness of texture were of the 
very essence of his art, and the writing of prose 
doubtless seemed to him a homely and uninspiring 
business, hardly worthy of one whose conception of 
beauty was very high. Both in his talk and in his 
familiar letters there was an entire absence of any- 
thing affected or pompous. His natural mode of ex- 
pression was brisk, incisive, penetrating; but artistic 
presentment was for him a thing apart, a pontifical 
and ceremonious matter, and he drew a very sharp 
line between what was appropriate to ordinary inter- 
course, — where he said and wrote just what was in 
his mind, with the impressiveness of an able, critical, 
and somewhat intolerant character, — and what was 
appropriate to the deliberate service of art. If 
Eossetti had set himself to write prose, it is obvious 
from what remains that he might have taken a high 
rank among prose writers. But besides the two early 
compositions Hand and Soid, and St. Agnes of Interces- 
sion, which is unfinished, there is nothing of an origi- 
nal kind, apart from his correspondence. The matter 
that he contributed to Gilchrist's Life of Blake is the 
most important prose work of his later years ; and there 
is a certain amount of art criticism, and a little liter- 
ary criticism which has only a secondary value. In 
these latter writings, his eager generosity, his deter- 
mination to see and recognise whatever was good, is 
almost too liberally emphasised at the expense of his 
critical judgment. 

Hand and Soul is a romance with a careful circum- 
stantial setting. It is an imaginary episode in the life 



154 ROSSETTI [chap. 

of a young painter called Chiaro dell' Erma, a native 
of Arezzo, who hears of the famous painter, Giunta 
Pisano, and determines to become his pupil. On arriv- 
ing at Pisa and entering the studio, he soon becomes 
aware that he knows more of art than the master can 
teach him, and is drawn aside into the vivid enjoyment 
of social life. Prom this purposeless existence he is 
aroused by hearing mentioned the name of a young 
painter, Bonaventura, who, it is said, bids fair to be 
a rival of Giunta. Chiaro awakes like a man out of a 
pleasant dream, and throws himself wholly into the 
pursuit of art. Three years of work bring him fame, 
but he is not satisfied ; there falls upon him a deeper 
hunger of the spirit: he recognises that his ideals 
have been of the earth, that he has been content with 
the mere worship of beauty and the recognition of the 
world. He determines to devote his art to "the 
presentment of some moral greatness that should 
influence the beholder." But in carrying this out, 
he finds that he has lost his power over the hearts 
and imaginations of men ; and he recognises that he 
is no nearer the enjoyment of that interior peace 
which alone is worth striving for. One day there is 
a great festival at Pisa ; Chiaro has no heart to join 
the simple-minded throng, but sits in his balcony look- 
ing out upon the porch of San Petronio, and the crowd 
that goes and comes. In the porch are some frescoes 
which he himself has painted, representing Peace in an 
allegory, and he sees with horror and dismay a fight 
take place in the street between two rival factions, in 
which swords are drawn and his frescoes bespattered 
with blood. 

Then he sees that he has failed in his highest ideal 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE— LETTERS 155 

as well, and that he has no direct influence upon the 
world such as he desires. 

Then he is suddenly aware of the presence in his 
room of a lady of marvellous beauty, austere but 
gentle, who speaks to him and tells him that she is 
the image of his own very soul. She tells him that 
though he has failed both in his pursuit of fame and 
in the higher pursuit of faith, yet because he has not 
followed meaner ends, such as wealth or ease, there is 
hope yet. Then she tells him that he must make 
a wise and humble sacrifice ; that God is strong and 
has no 7ieed of him, that he has erred in thinking that 
he can help God. He must set himself humbly to 
serve, ivith hand and soid. 

Then she bids him paint her as she stands; and 
afterwards he falls asleep. There the story ceases; 
and to this is appended a circumstantial account by the 
author of his finding in the Pitti Gallery — the number 
and the room are given — a wonderful portrait of a 
woman, with the words " Manus animam pinxit " and 
a date ; the author listens to a contemptuous dialogue 
of Italian and French art-students about the picture — 
and so the narrative ends. 

It may be added that the circumstantial nature of 
the details mystified many readers. There are 
instances on record of people looking for the picture, 
and expressing to Rossetti disappointment that it was 
no longer there. Rossetti seems to have enjoyed the 
little mystery, and to have rather encouraged it than 
the reverse. 

Besides the autobiographical interest, the actual 
writing is of a singularly pure and lofty type. It is 
wonderful to reflect that the greater part of it was 



156 ROSSETTI [chap. 

written in a single night; but this gives it a unity 
and spontaneity that increase the charm. The sen- 
tences move with a certain stiffness, and the language 
is for the most part archaic in colour, of an antique 
precision and grace, strongly reminiscent of the Book 
of Job, though there is a certain mingling of modern 
terms. The whole has an exquisite formal simplicity 
of expression that gives it an indefinable flavour of 
beauty. A few passages may be quoted from it. The 
effect of beauty upon the sensitive apprehension of 
Chiaro is indicated in a sentence which recalls Leonardo 
da Vinci — "he would feel faint in sunsets and at the 
sight of stately persons," — and the description of 
Chiaro himself is naively told : — 

" Women loved Chiaro ; for, in despite of the burthen 
of study, he was well-favoured and very manly in his 
walking ; and, seeing his face in front, there was a 
glory upon it, as upon the face of one who feels a light 
round his hair." 

Again, there are many passages of an obscure beauty, 
where an image is hinted rather than told in detail. 
At the first sight of the mystical lady of his soul : — 

"He was like one who, scaling a great steepness, 
hears his own voice echoed in some place much higher 
than he can see, and the name ofivhich is not known to 
him." 

There are many flashes of deep insight throughout 
the tale. Thus of the emulous passion which rises in 
the aspiring soul, he writes : — 

" Or, at times, when he could not paint, he would sit 
for hours in thought of all the greatness the world had 
known from of old ; until he was weak with yearning, 
like one who gazes upon a path of stars." 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 157 

But where the Soul speaks to him, the whole 
narrative rises into a higher and more prophetic strain. 
The following is a noble passage, declaring the truth 
that the artist must be content to have given joy to 
others, even though he lacks the fruition of fame : — 

" For Fame, in noble soils, is a fruit of the Spring : but 
not therefore should it be said : ' Lo ! my garden that I 
planted is barren : the crocus is here, but the lily is dead 
in the dry ground, and shall not lift the earth that covers 
it: therefore I will fling my garden together, and give it 
unto the builders.' Take heed rather that thou trouble not 
the tvise secret earth ; for in the mould that thou throwest 
up shall the first tender growth lie to waste ; which else had 
been made strong in its season. Yea, and even if the year 
fall past in all its months, and the soil be indeed, to thee, 
peevish and incapable, and though thou indeed gather all thy 
harvest, and it suffice for others, and thou remain vexed with 
emptiness ; and others drink of thy streams, and the drouth 
rasp thy throat ; — let it be enough that these have found the 
feast good, and thanked the giver : remembering that, when 
the winter is striven through, there is another year, whose 
wind is meek, and whose sun fulfilleth all." 

In these latter passages the influence of the pro- 
phetic books of the Old Testament is unmistakable; 
the sentences have the detached cadences of Hebrew 
poetry. But what is more interesting than the 
manner, is the intensity of spiritual vision which the 
whole reveals. It is a confession of Faith of the most 
intimate kind. I believe that there exists no docu- 
ment more vital to the understanding of the principles 
on which Rossetti worked, and the lofty conception of 
art thus formulated. Few of Rossetti's fellow-labourers 
could have sketched so noble an ideal ; and we may be 
grateful that one whose hatred of any assumption of 



158 KOSSETTI [chap. 

superiority, any pompous enunciation of lofty aims, 
was so sincere, did for once draw aside the veil 
from a secluded spirit, and reveal his deepest and 
most sacred dreams. Whether this source of inspira- 
tion abode with Rossetti through his life, or whether 
it was a vision of truth seen in a moment of generous 
insight, and to which he failed to be true, is hard to 
judge. Certainly in later days he kept silence on 
these matters, or else his thoughts are not recorded. 
He certainly never pursued wealth or fame for its own 
sake ; it may perhaps be thought that, like Solomon, 
he was drawn aside from the austerer vision by the 
seductions of sense, and, as Keats's pilgrim, fell under 
the spell of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Perhaps, like 
the knight of the legend, he strayed in among the 
dusky groves of the Hill of Venus, and bowed his 
knee to other gods. We dare not say. He never 
deliberately abandoned the faith of his youth, and 
he always strove to let the hand paint the soul. But 
it is difficult not to feel that a spirit nurtured on such 
thoughts as these, that thus greeted him upon the 
threshold of days, might have reached a wider and 
richer development both in art and life. 

The story called St. Agnes of Intercession was origin- 
ally to have been called An Auto])sycliology, and was 
intended for the Germ. It was begun in 1848 or 
1849, and was never finished. Rossetti was planning 
to finish it in his last illness, but apparently did 
not even begin to do so. It is a strange, mystical 
story, and is mainly interesting from the autobiogra- 
phical passages which occur in it, and which have 
already been quoted. The story is told by an art- 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 159 

student who, as a child, finds a picture of St. Agnes 
in glory, by an old master, Bucciuolo Angiolieri. He 
is curiously attracted by this. When he reaches man's 
estate he meets a beautiful girl, Miss Mary Arden, 
and becomes engaged to her. Miss Arden sits to 
him for the central figure of a large picture which 
he is painting. It is exhibited, and being hung on 
the line attracts great attention. The painter goes 
to the exhibition and meets an art critic there, who 
is described so minutely, that it seems probable that 
some personal satire is intended. The critic sees the 
picture, and commenting upon it, says that the central 
figure reminds him of the work of Angiolieri. The 
painter becomes suddenly aware of an extraordinary 
likeness between Miss Arden and the St. Agnes. 
He determines to see the picture itself, and goes 
to Italy, where, after searching in vain in several 
galleries for it, he finds it at Perugia, and learns 
that the picture was painted by Angiolieri from his 
aflELanced mistress, who sat to him when in the grip 
of mortal illness, and actually died while the picture 
was being painted. He then goes to Lucca, and finds 
a picture of Angiolieri, painted by the artist's own 
hand, in which he recognises, with a shock of terror, 
his own features. He hurries home, with a fever upon 
him, and on his return has a long illness. Here the 
narrative breaks off. But the intended conclusion is 
known from an etching which Millais prepared to 
illustrate the story, and which still exists, from which 
it is clear that Miss Arden was to have sat to him 
for another picture, and was to have died while being 
painted. INIoreover, a little water-colour of Rossetti's, 
called Bonifazio's Mistress, representing a girl dying 



160 EOSSETTI [chap. 

while sitting for her portrait to her lover, is in reality 
a design for the same scene. 

The story is diffusely told, and is written in modern 
English with no flavour of archaism. It has no great 
literary interest, from the point of view of style ; but 
it illustrates the mystical supernaturalism which lay 
very deep in Kossetti's character. 

The only other piece of deliberate prose writing, 
except a few reviews and criticisms of pictures, is 
the contribution Rossetti made to Gilchrist's Life of 
Blake. 

Eossetti in 1847 had purchased for ten shillings a 
MS. book of Blake's, containing a quantity of fragments 
of prose and verse, and some designs. It is interesting 
to note that there were in this book a number of gibes 
and jeers against certain accepted painters, such as 
Correggio, Titian, Eubens, Rembrandt, Reynolds, and 
Gainsborough, whom Blake thought exuberant, or liable 
to disguise tenuity of thought by tricks of manner. 
The volume was borrowed from Rossetti by Alexander 
Gilchrist, who was then preparing Blake's Life, which 
was published in 1863. Gilchrist died prematurely 
before the book was finished, and Rossetti, with char- 
acteristic generosity, helped Mrs. Gilchrist with the 
critical part of the biography, wrote a considerable 
passage, and edited some of the poems included. 

He wrote, while he was doing the work, that he found 
it necessary to go to the British Museum to study the 
coloured works of Blake, adding, " All I could think of 
was to dwell on some of these. Facts, and descriptions 
of facts, are in my line; but to talk about a thing 
merely is what I could never well manage." He say§ 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 161 

again that it is useless to attempt to comment on in- 
dividual poems. " The truth is that, as regards such 
a poem as My Spectre, I do not understand it a bit 
better than anybody else; only I know, better than 
some may know, that it has claims as poetry apart 
from the question of understanding it, and is therefore 
worth printing." 

The whole passage is vigorous, and the criticism is 
sound and judicious. It contains not only some strik- 
ing enunciations of artistic principles, but some beau- 
tiful pieces of descriptive writing. 

"Tenderness," he writes, "the constant unison of 
wonder and familiarity so mysteriously allied in nature, 
the sense of fulness and abundance such as we feel in 
a field, not because we pry into it all, but because it is 
all there : these are the inestimable prizes to be secured 
only by such study in the painter's every picture." 

He describes with great felicity Blake's " prismatic " 
system of colour — and the " spiritual quality [of his 
designs] which always mingles with their truth to 
nature," the combination of " subtle and exquisite 
reality " and " ideal grandeur " ; " whether we find him 
dealing with the pastoral sweetness of drinking cattle 
at a stream, their hides and fleeces all glorified by 
sunset with magic rainbow hues ; or revealing to us, 
in a flash of creative genius, some parted sky and beaten 
sea full of poi'tentoiis expectation." 

Again, nothing could be more masterly, more pene- 
trative, than the following descriptions of Blake's 
designs, "such conceptions as painter never before 
dreamed of : some old skeleton folded together in the 
dark bowels of earth or rock, discoloured with metal- 
lic stain and vegetable mould; some symbolic human 



162 KOSSETTI [chap. 

birth of crowned flowers at dawn, amid rosy light 
and the joyful opening of all things." 

Or again, in the description of the designs for the 
Book of Job : — " Here, at the base, are sheepfolds 
watched by shepherds ; up the sides is a trellis, on 
whose lower rings birds sit upon their nests, while 
angels, on the higher ones, worship round flame and 
cloud, till it arches at the summit into a sky full of 
the written words of God." 

The criticisms on Blake's poems display a delicate 
sympathy and a power of entering into the original 
conception. Yet they are always balanced ; he warns 
the student of Blake against " seeking for a sense more 
recondite than was really meant." But as a spiritual 
commentary on Blake's work these criticisms have a 
profoundly stimulating effect, especially in a beautiful 
passage too long to quote here, commenting very fully 
on the poem Broken Love. 

To illustrate another side of Rossetti's power of 
expression, his reply to Tlie FlesJdy School of Poetry 
is most dignified in manner, and moreover affords 
a good instance of his command over simple, nervous, 
unaffected English. It appeared in the AtliencBum for 
December 16, 1871. Rossetti rebuts Buchanan's criti- 
cism on the lines which he had quoted from the first 
of the four sonnets entitled Willow-tvood : — 

" And as I stooped, her own lips rising there 

Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth." 

He continues : — " The critic has quoted (as I said) 
only the last two lines, and he has italicised the 
second as something unbearable and ridiculous. Of 
course the inference would be that this was really 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTP:RS 163 

my own absurd bubble-and-squeak notion of an actu.al 
kiss. The reader will perceive at once, from the whole 
sonnet transcribed above, how untrue such an inference 
would be. The sonnet describes a dream or trance of 
divided love momentarily re-united by the longing 
fancy ; and in the imagery of the dream, the face of 
the beloved rises through deep dark waters to kiss the 
lover. Thus the phrase, ' Bubbled with brimming 
kisses,' etc., bears purely on the special symbolism 
employed, and from that point of view will be found, 
I believe, perfectly simple and just." 

The above passage shows that the urgency of the 
controversy did not deprive Rossetti of his sense of 
humour. 

Indeed, the whole defence is wonderfully restrained 
and temperate, though it glows with a fierce heat of 
inner indignation, and is in strong contrast with the 
view that afterwards unhappily took possession of 
Eossetti's mind, exasperated by morbid brooding and 
weakened by an enervating anodyne. 

Eossetti may fairly be ranked among the best writers 
of familiar letters. A large number have been pub- 
lished, and the "Family Letters" in vol. ii. of Mr. W. 
M. Eossetti's Letters and Memoirs, the letters to William 
Allingham, edited by Dr. Birkbeck Hill, and the ex- 
tracts given by Mr. Hall Caine in the Recollections, 
contain the most important. 

Eossetti wrote as he talked, entirely without affecta- 
tion, and as a rule in a vein of robust cheerfulness. 
At the same time there are in the " Family Letters," 
in which he appears in his most lovable light, many 
passages of the most loyal and tender affection. 



164 EOSSETTI [chap. 

He did not indulge mnch in description, saying on one 
occasion, "Landscape-letters are things to me impos- 
sible," but when he did so, he touched the characteristics 
of a scene with wonderful felicity. 

It would be difficult to publish a just selection of the 
letters, because in the first place they are very allusive, 
and require a good deal of explanatory comment, and 
in the second place they are so interwoven with small 
personal detail as to render selection very difficult. 

Rossetti, when younger, liked writing, "even busi- 
ness letters," as he once said. In early days at Cheyne 
Walk he designed an elaborate device for his letter- 
paper,^ and had it printed on fine handmade paper; 
but with characteristic indolence about small matters, 
when the original stock was exhausted, it was seldom 
or never replenished, and many of the letters are 
written on any paper he could get hold of at a moment's 
notice. In later life he found writing more tiresome, 
and there are many allusions in his letters to his own 
dilatoriness as a correspondent. His handwriting was 
at first small, and almost niggling, but he acquired, as 
years went on, a fine, masterful, clear hand, very bold 
in sweep and outline, which only at the end grew 
tremulous and uncertain. The greater part of the 
family letters take their origin in some matter of 
small business or domestic arrangement, but those 
which he wrote to Allingham have much more de- 
liberate criticism of a light kind ; he wrote freely of 
the books he was reading, and of the peo^jle among 
whom he was living. 

1 A double circle, containing on the right his monogram, and 
on the left a flourishing tree with the motto frangas non 

FLECTAS. 



VI. ] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 165 

The letters to Mr. Caine, though they contain some 
of the most valuable of his critical dicta, were written 
under more melancholy auspices, when he was living a 
secluded life and besieged by hypochondriacal fancies. 
Yet the relation in which he found himself to Mr. Caine 
— that of the veteran man of letters confronted with 
the enthusiasm of a young and critically sympathetic 
admirer — called out a generous affection on Kossetti's 
part, which proves how grateful he was for apprecia- 
tion, and how ready to place the resources of his 
mind at the disposal of one who understood him. But 
still there is a shadow and a weariness over this corre- 
spondence, absent from the Allingham letters, which 
bubble out like a spring into the sunshine. 

Nothing comes out more clearly than his sympathetic 
observation of animals, and the chronicles of Dizzy, 
the Kelmscott dog, are worthy to be ranked with 
Cowper's letters about his hares. 

I subjoin a few extracts which may illustrate some 
of the special characteristics of the letters. But it 
must be said that they pre-eminently deserve to be 
read in their entirety, and that the setting of current 
affairs and personal topics in which the more deliberate 
passages are framed are not the least part of their 
charm : — 

To William Allingham (1854). 

"Hike MacCrac pretty well enough. . . . My stern treat- 
ment of him was untemiiered by even a moment's weakness. 
I told him I had nothing whatever to show him, and that his 
picture was not begun, which placed us at once on a perfect 
understanding. He seems hard up." 



166 ROSSETTI [chap. 

To William, Allingham. 

November 1854. 

" Have you seen anything of W. B. Scott's volume? I may 
be able to send it yon sooner or later, if you like. The title- 
page has a vignette with the words 'Poems by a Painter' 
printed very gothically indeed. A copy being sent to old 
Carlyle, he did not read any of the poems, but read the title, 
' Poems by a Printer.' He wrote off at once to the imaginary 
printer to tell him to stick to his types and give up his meta- 
phors. Woolner saw the book lying at Carlyle's, lieard the 
story, and told him of his mistake, at which he had the de- 
cency to seem a little annoyed, as he knows Scott, and esteems 
him and his family. Now that we are allied with Turkey, 
we might think seriously of the bastinado for that old man, 
on such occasions as the above." 

To William Allingham, speaking of possible improve- 
ments in one of his own engravings (1855). 

" I showed the proof yesterday to Woolner, who saw the 
original drawing, and he was as shocked as myself. Never- 
theless ... it would be possible to improve it a good deal, I 
believe — not by adding shadows . . . but by cutting out 
lines, by which means the human character might be par- 
tially substituted for the oyster and goldfish cast of features, 
and other desirable changes eifected." 

To William Allingham. 

14 Chatham Place, Blackfbiars. 
(End of 1856.) 

"... To-day here is neither a bright day nor a dark day, 
but a white smutty day, — piebald, — wherein, accordingly, 
life seems neither worth keeping nor getting rid of. The 
thick sky has a thin red sun stuck in the middle of it, like the 
specimen wafer stuck outside a box of them. Even if you 
turned back the lid, there would be nothing behind it, be sure, 
but a jumble of such flat dead suns. I am going to sleep." 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE— LETTERS 1G7 

To William AlUngham. 

(Postmark — December 18, 1856.) 

" The piece of news freshest in my mind is Aurora Leigh, — 
an astounding work, surely. You said notliing of it. I know 
that St. Francis and Poverty do not wed in these days of 
St. James' Church, with rows of portrait figures on either 
side, and the corners neatly finished with angels. I know 
that if a blind man were to enter the room this evening and 
talk to me for some hours, I should, with the best intentions, 
be indanger of twigging his blindness before the right moment 
came, if such there were, for the chord in the orchestra and 
the proper theatrical start ; yet with all my knowledge I have 
felt something like a bug ever since reading Aurora Leigh, 
Oh, the wonder of it ! and oh, the bore of writing about it. 

" The Brownings are long gone back now, and with them 
one of my delights, — an evening resort where I never felt un- 
happy. How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those 
two small people? — taking meanwhile so little room in any 
railway carriage, and hardly needing a double bed at the inn." 

To Ford Madox Brown. 

Cheyne Walk, 1866. 

"... I was very sorry to bolt in that way so early from 
such a really jolly party as yours. But, Brown, if you had 
known ! Doubtless you, in common with your guests, admired 
my elegant languor and easy grace. But O Brown, had Truth 
herself been there to rend away my sheltering coat! Be- 
hold me ! [Picture of D. G. R. with bursting coat, etc., 
called Physical condition and mental attitude.^ 

" The burden of conscious fat and hypocrisy, the stings of 
remorse, the haunting dread of exposure as every motion 
wafted the outer garment to this side or to that, the senses 
quickened to catch the fatal sound of further rents — all this 
and more — but let us draw once more over the scene that veil 
which Fate respected. Might not Tupper say truly, ' Let not 
!Man, fattening, leave his dress-ti'owsers too long unworn, lest 
a worse thing come unto him'? — Your affectionate D. G. R." 



168 ROSSETTI [chap. 

To Ms Mother from Kelmscott (1873). 

"... On Thursday George was at a wedding at Manches- 
ter, and during his al3sence Dizzy returned for a while to his 
cuneiform stage of aspect and demeanour. He has been very 
funny in various ways. On one occasion we got a musical 
instrument — a dulcimer, which lies flat on the ground — and 
put a bit of sugar on the strings. Then, as Dizzy approached 
to take it, the strings were immediately struck with the plec- 
trum, and the contest of terror and appetite in Dizzy's bosom 
was delicious. On one occasion an attempt was made, in 
his interest, to reduce him to a diet of dog-biscuit. He be- 
came gradually more and more dejected, until one morning 
he ate a stone instead, which, reappearing on the hearthrug, 
convinced his master that he must not be reduced to despair 
again. Whenever he wants to be petted, his plan is to eat 
a bit of crab-apple, or something he obviously would not eat 
if he could help it. An outcry of compassion is the imme- 
diate result, followed by successive courses of kidneys, 
macaroni, etc." 

To Mr. Hall Came (1880). 

" It is an awful fact that sun, moon, or candlelight once 
looked down on the human portent of Dr. Johnson and Mrs. 
Hannah More convened in solemn conclave above the out- 
spread sonnets of INIilton, with a meritorious and considerate 
resolve of finding out for him 'why they were so bad.' 
This is so stupendous a warning, that perhaps it may even 
incline one to find some of them better than they are." 

To Mr. Hall Caine (ivho ivas then making an anthology 
of sonnets) (1880). 

"' How are they [the poets] to be approached?' — you in- 
nocently ask. Ye heavens ! how does the cat's-meat-man 
approach Grimalkin? — and what is that relation in life 
when compared to the rapport established between the living 
bard and the fellow-creature who is disposed to cater to his 
caterwauling appetite for publicity ? " 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 169 

But it is very nearly impossible to give any idea of 
the charm of such letters by quoting a few extracts ; 
and the above passages are as inadequate to illus- 
trate the free and vigorous beauty of the original, as 
entomological specimens pinned in a collector's cabi- 
net to suggest the bright insects that upon a rosebed 
in midsummer open and shut their rainbow wings. 

I will here add a few scattered critical dicta of 
Rossetti's from letters and recorded talk. What, for 
instance, could be more vigorous than the following 
maxim which occurs in a letter of 1873 to Mr. 
Gosse ? — 

" It seems to me that all poetry, to be really enduring, 
is bound to be as amusing (however trivial the word 
may sound) as any other class of literature ; and I do 
not think that enough amusement to keep it alive can 
ever be got out of incidents not amounting to events." 

This is a truth which is not only often neglected, 
but is sacrificed to a false ideal of literary dignity. 
I suppose that Rossetti used the word in the sense 
of interesting, and not in the conversational sense of 
laughable. It is, perhaps, a reminiscence of the use 
of the word by Dr. Johnson, who calls Coriolanus " one 
of the most amusing " of Shakespeare's plays in the 
sense of " abounding in dramatic interest." 

Again : — " Poetry should seem to the hearer to have 
been always present to his thought, but never before 
heard." 

Again : — " Moderation is the highest law of poetry. 
Experimental as Coleridge sometimes becomes, his best 
work is tuned but never twanged ; and this is his 
great distinction from almost all others who venture 
as far." Again, embodying one of the most memorable 



170 ROSSETTI [chap. 

literary dicta ever enunciated, he wrote to Mr. Hall 
Caine : — 

" You have much too great a habit of speaking of a 
special octave, segtette, or line. Conception, my boy, 
FUNDAMENTAL BRAiNWORK, that is what makcs the 
difference in all art. Work your metal as much as you 
like, but first take care that it is gold and worth work- 
ing. A Shakspearean sonnet is better than the most 
pei;fect in form, because Shakspeare wrote it." 

Again, what could be a more felicitous description 
of a certain class of lyric than the following ? Eossetti 
is speaking of Sydney Dobell's poem Keith of Ravelston, 
which he greatly admired : — 

"I have always regarded that poem as being one of 
the finest, of its length, in any modern poet ; ranking 
with Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and the other 
masterpieces of the condensed and hinted order so dear 
to imaginative minds." 

The above criticisms all seem to me to show the 
hard intellectual force, so distinct from the dreamy 
character with which Eossetti is generally credited, 
which he brought to bear on his art. There is no 
vagueness or looseness about them ; he goes straight 
down to fundamental principles. Nothing proves more 
conclusively the sanity and sense of Eossetti's critical 
power than his discussion of particular authors. He 
had very strong preferences, but he never, so to speak, 
swallowed an author whole, except, perhaps, in the 
case of Chatterton, nor was in the least blinded either 
by prestige or by his own admiration. 

Many admirable fragments of literary criticism occur 
in various letters, though of course it must be borne 
in mind that they are informal criticisms, written 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 171 

off on the spur of the moment, and not deliberately- 
formed and expressed. It will be clear, I think, that 
he had a strong perceptive judgment; but that his 
synthetic power of criticism was weak as compared to 
his analytic insight; that he could estimate the value 
of a particular poem or a particular author, but that 
he had little taste for critical comparison. 

The following, to Mr. Caine, contains an admirable 
forecast of the probable development in the case of 
Keats and Shelley, both of whom he ranked very 
high : — 

" I am truly delighted to hear how young you are. 
In original work, a man does some of his best things 
by your time of life, though he only finds it out in a 
rage much later, at some date when he expected to 
know no longer that he had ever done them. Keats 
hardly died so much too early — not at all if there had 
been any danger of his taking to the modern habit 
eventually — treating material as product, and shoot- 
ing it all out as it comes. Of course, however, he 
wouldn't ; he was getting always choicer and simpler, 
and my favourite piece in his works is La Belle Dame 
Sans Merci — I suppose about his last. As to Shelley, it 
is really a mercy that he has not been hatching yearly 
universes till now. He might, I suppose ; for his friend 
Trelawny still walks the earth without great-coat, 
stockings, or underclothing, this Christmas [1879]. 
In criticism, matters are different, as to seasons of 
production. ... I am writing hurriedly and horribly 
in every sense. Write on the subject again, and I'll 
try to answer better. All greetings to you." 

Again of Keats and Shelley he wrote : — 

" You quote some of Keats's sayings. One of the 



172 ROSSETTI [chap. 

most characteristic I thiuk is in a letter to Hay don : — 
' I value more the privilege of seeing great things in 
loneliness, than the fame of a prophet.' I had not in 
mind the quotations you give from Keats as bearing 
on the poetic (or prophetic) mission of ' doing good.' 
I must say that I should not have thought a longer 
career thrown away upon him (as you intimate) if he 
had continued to the age of anything only to give joy. 
Nor would he ever have done any 'good' at all. 
Shelley did good, and perhaps some harm with it. 
Keats's joy was after all a flawless gift. 

" Keats wrote to Shelley : — ' You, I am sure, will for- 
give me for sincerely remarking that you might curb 
your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load 
every rift of your svibject with ore.' Cheeky ! — but not 
so much amiss. Poetry, and no prophecy, however, 
must come of that mood, — and no pulpit would have 
held Keats's wings, — the body and mind together were 
not heavy enough for a counterweight." 

Coleridge, again, was an author whom Rossetti ad- 
mired very deeply : " I worship him on the right side 
of idolatry," he wrote ; and it adds a pathetic interest 
to the fact to realise that he saw in the tragic and 
blighted career of Coleridge a sad likeness to his own 
sufferings. Thus he wrote to Mr. Caine : — 

" About Coleridge (whom I only view as a poet, his 
other aspects being to my apprehension mere bogies) I 
conceive the leading point about his work is its human 
love, and the leading point about his career, the sad 
fact of how little of it was devoted to that work. 
These are the points made in my sonnet, and the last 
is such as I (alas !) can sympathise with, though what 
has excluded more poetry with me {mountains of it 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTEKS 173 

I don't want to heap) lias chiefly been livelihood 
necessity." 

The following are a few of Rossetti's impromptu 
judgments on various writers ; they show both his 
intolerance and his insight. Of Longfellow and Walt 
Whitman he wrote to AUingham in 1856 : — 

"How I loathe Wishi-washi,^ — of course without 
reading it. I have not been so happy in loathing 
anything for a long while — except, I think, Leaves of 
Grass, by that Orson of yours. I should like just to 
have the writing of a valentine to him in one of the 
reviews." 

Rossetti never wholly altered his mind about Walt 
Whitman. He wrote of Leaves of Grass in 1857 : — 

" The Leaves are suggestive, like the advertisement 
columns of a newspaper, or a stroll along Fleet Street 
. . . but poetry without form is — what shall I say ? 
Proportion seems to me the most inalienable quality 
of a poem. From the chaos of incident and reflection 
arise the rounded worlds of poetry, and go singing on 
their way." 

Again, he makes an interesting comparison of 
Oliver Madox Brown and Chatterton, the latter of 
whom he regarded with a singular admiration : — 

" Oliver was the product of the most teeming hot- 
beds of art and literature, and even of compulsory 
addiction to the art of painting, in which nevertheless 
he was rapidly becoming as much a proficient as in 
literature. What he would have been if, like the 
ardent and heroic Chatterton, he had had to fight a 
single-handed battle for art and bread together against 
merciless mediocrity in high places, — what he would 
1 Longfellow's Hiawatha. 



174 EOSSETTI [chap. 

then have become, I cannot in the least calculate ; but 
we know what Chatterton became." 

The following is an admirable criticism : — 

" I've been greatly interested in Wuthering Heights, 
the first novel I've read for an age, and the best (as 
regards power and sound style) for two ages, except 
Sidonia} But it is a fiend of a book, — an incredible 
monster, combining all the stronger female tendencies 
from Mrs. Browning to Mrs. Brownrigg.^ The action 
is laid in hell, — only it seems places and people have 
English names there." 

At an early date his chief enthusiasm was for 
Browning. And in this connection it is interesting to 
note what he says after a visit he had just paid to 
Browning's home : — 

"The father and uncle [of Browning] — father espe- 
cially — show just that submissive yet highly cheer- 
ful and capable simplicity of character which often, I 
think, appears in the family of a great man who uses 
at last what the others have kept for him." 

It is remarkable that he never did Wordsworth 
justice; but the ideals of the two were so radically 
dissimilar, that it is not surprising. Eossetti above 
all things disliked being, as it were, preached to from a 
superior platform ; and this attribute in Wordsworth 
perhaps blinded him to the magnificence of much of his 
work. He resented Wordsworth's sacerdotal attitude, 
combined with a touch of the showman, towards 
Nature. To Allingham he wrote of Wordsworth, 
"He's good, you know, but unbearable." 

1 Sidonia the Sorceress, by Wilhelm Meinhold (author of The 
Amber Witch). 

2 The 'Prenti-cide, executed at Newgate. 



VI.] TRANSLATIONS — PROSE — LETTERS 175 

Again, speaking more in detail of Wordsworth, 
Rossetti wrote : — 

" With the verdicts given throughout ... I generally 
sympathise, but not with the unqualified homage to 
Wordsworth. A reticence almost invariably present 
is fatal in my eyes to the highest pretensions on 
behalf of his sonnets. Eeticence is but a poor sort 
of muse, nor is tentativeness (so often to be traced 
in his work) a good accompaniment in music. Take 
the sonnet on Toussaint VOuverture (in my opinion 
his noblest, and very noble indeed) and study (from 
Main's ^ note) the lame and fumbling changes made, in 
various editions of the early lines, which remain lame 
in the end. Far worse than this, study the relation of 
the closing lines of his famous sonnet The World is too 
much ivith us, etc., to a passage in Spenser, and say 
whether plagiarism was ever more impudent or mani- 
fest (again I derive from Main's excellent exposition 
of the point), and then consider whether a bard was 
likely to do this once and yet not to do it often. 
Primary vital impulse was surely not fully developed 
in his muse." 

The above are only instances taken at random of 
Rossetti's literary judgments, and many more will be 
found scattered up and down his correspondence. But 
they constitute, I think, a very remarkable body of 
critical dicta, worthy of the maturity of the man who 
at the age of thirteen or fourteen could detect that 
an Italian lyric, ^ Clori, in a privately printed volume 
by his grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, was an adapta- 
tion of Sir Henry Wotton's " You meaner beauties of 
the night." 

1 Main's Treasury of Enrjlish Sonnets. Blackwood, 1880. 



CHAPTER VII 

PAINTING 

It is loosely said that Eossetti is the most pictorial 
of poets, and the most literary of painters. Such a 
statement has a certain superficial truth about it. He 
lived strongly in both worlds ; he drew designs for his 
poems, and he wrote sonnets for his pictures. But his 
most characteristic work, the House of Life, is in no sense 
pictorial poetry : he is not, for instance, so pictorial a 
poet as Keats, Tennyson, or William Morris. If 
Tennyson had been a painter, it would have been easy 
to point to the galleries of word-landscapes with which 
he adorned his poems. Again, with Rossetti, the most 
characteristic of his pictures, the kind which by the 
superficially informed person he is supposed always 
to have painted — the half-length designs of mystical 
women, mainly of three very notable types — these 
have no special literary quality. 

The scope of this little volume, which is to present 
Rossetti as a man of letters, does not permit the 
question of his pictorial art to be treated exhaustively. 
But it may be remembered that Ruskin deliberately 
said of him, " I believe that Rossetti's name should be 
placed first on the list of men, within my own range of 
knowledge, who have raised and changed the spirit of 

176 



CHAP. VII.] PAINTING 177 

modern art ; raised it in absolute attainment, changed 
in direction of temper." So close a parallel exists 
between Rossetti's pictorial and his poetical work, that 
it is necessary to indicate the lines on which he worked. 

In both poems and pictures there is the same ardent 
imagination, the same firm, intellectual conception, the 
same patient and elaborate method traceable. 

The artistic influences under which Rossetti first 
fell cannot be very definitely indicated. He never 
went to Italy, but he studied Italian pictures carefully 
in the National Gallery and the Dulwich Gallery, and 
such private collections as those at Stafford House and 
Bridge water House. He cared little for engravings or 
reproductions of pictures, though in later life he 
collected photographs of works which he admired. 
In his early visits to Paris he expresses certain pre- 
ferences in art, as for Flandrin and Ingres. In 1849, 
however, when he visited Bruges, he fell for a time 
under the fascination of Memling and Van Eyck, and 
it is interesting to note that he considered the former 
to be the greater man, on the ground of his intellectual 
superiority. 

But it cannot be said that Dutch art left any very 
marked effect on Rossetti's work. He was really only 
deeply affected by Italian painting, and especially in 
the direction of colour by the Venetian School. 

The great artistic influence which was brought to 
bear on him in England was through the work of 
Ford Madox Brown. Madox Brown was a man of 
very high original genius, whose power was never 
really recognised in England, until after his death. 
He was not a conciliatory person, and he embarked 
early in a quarrel with the Academy which had 



178 KOSSETTI [chap. 

disastrous effects upon his fame. Ford Madox Brown 
differed from other English artists of the period in the 
fact that he had been strongly influenced by the French 
School, whereas other artists went to Italy for their 
inspiration. Madox Brown worked at Bruges, Ghent, 
Antwerp (under Baron Wappers), Paris, and finally 
Eome. He said of himself, however, that his art was 
not Belgian nor Parisian, but Spanish. And he char- 
acteristically wrote, " In Paris I first formed my idea 
of making my pictures real, because no French artist 
at the time did so." 

English art was at a low ebb in all departments. 
The great school of portrait-painters, Keynolds, 
Eomney, Raeburn, and Lawrence, had expired. The 
" grand " style flared up and out with such artists as 
Benjamin West, Fuseli, and Haydon. The great school 
of poetical landscape-painters, fathered by Gainsborough 
and Morland, was represented by such painters as 
Callcott, Patrick IsTasmyth, Stanfield, and Frederick 
Lee, all good executants, but vitiated by a certain arti- 
ficiality of methods. The meteoric force of Turner, 
with his transcendental treatment of ISTature, was a 
thing by itself, and can hardly be said to have influ- 
enced the Pre-Raphaelites at all; though there is 
among the Rossetti papers one interesting statement 
of Mr. Holman Hunt's, made in early days, where he 
places Turner first among landscape-painters ; and a 
still more interesting statement of Mr. Whistler's of 
the same date condemning Turner on the ground 
that he does not meet either the simply natural or the 
decorative requirements of landscape art, which to him 
appeared the only alternatives. 

Otherwise the gejire school of English painting had 



vii.] PAINTING 179 

fallen under the frankest bourgeois influence, as in the 
case of a painter of true genius such as Landseer. 
There was an entire absence of loftiness of motive and. 
poetical intention. It is hardly an exaggeration to say- 
that in the Royal Academy, in the early part of the 
century, the teaching was Italian, the colouring Ger- 
man, the painting Flemish, and the inspiration plain 
unadorned British, generally commonplace, and indeed 
namby-pamby. 

Two painters may be held to have anticipated the 
Pre-Raphaelite method, Dyce and Noel Paton ; but the 
former, though an artist of high genius, was a much 
occupied man, and only painted fitfully, while the 
latter was lacking in the highest inspiration. Dyce 
was among the first to realise the merits of the Pre- 
Raphaelite painters. Ruskin, in a letter to M. Ches- 
neau (28th Dec. 1882), says that it was Dyce "who 
dragged me literally up to the picture of the Car- 
penter's SIio}),^ which I had passed disdainfully, and 
forced me to look for its merits." 

But Madox Brown, possessing a great fertility of 
poetical invention and a marvellous intellectual grasp 
of subject, and deliberately eschewing all melodramatic 
or theatrical devices (though he did not always escape 
them), was exactly the kind of mind to appeal to 
Rossetti. 

The Pre-Raphaelite theories have already been de- 
scribed, but it may be added that the stiffness and 
precision of the early works was an attempt not to 
copy the Italian painters, but to produce an effect of 
naivete and sincerity ; with the result that many of the 
uninitiated viewed them in the same light as Maro- 
^ Christ in the House of His Parents is the usual title. 



180 ROSSETTI [chap. 

clietti, when Euskin brought out for his inspection 
" the violently variegated segments and angular anat- 
omies of Lancelot and Guenevere at the grave of 
King Arthur " — and thereby produced, as Ruskin says, 
on the " bronze-minded sculptor simply the effect of a 
Knave of Clubs and Queen of Diamonds." It is re- 
markable to note how Millais, who was already a mas- 
ter of flowing outline, became stiff and mannered, as 
in the picture of Lorenzo and Isabella, and in order to 
be unsophisticated, submitted himself to the influence 
of early monkish drawings and illuminations. 

It would not be just to say that Madox Brown 
originated the Pre-Raphaelite School — it was all in 
the air. There was a strong feeling of revolt against 
the insincerity of English art ; and if he had not fired the 
train, it would have been fired by some other hand. 

Eossetti gradually drew away from his earlier style ; 
the archaic handling, the stiff treatment of accessories 
by degrees were left behind. Moreover, he became 
aware of his limitations. His early training had not 
been complete. " Proportions," he once said, " always 
bother me." He said to Mr. Watts-Dunton that 
Millais' executive power was paralysing to look upon. 
Breadth of design was another difficulty. 

In early days he planned large pictures with much 
movement and many figures, of which some, like 
Cassandra, remain as designs. Such, too, is Hist ! said 
Kate the Queen, a small picture founded on the scheme 
of a more ambitious one. Some of them were eventu- 
ally completed on a small scale, such as Tlie Salutation of 
Beatrice, Dante draiving the Angel, Dante'' s Dream, Mary 
Magdalene at the Door of Si7non, and some few others. 
But a variety of influences gradually turned his mind 



VII.] PAINTING 181 

in a definite direction. Partly, perhaps, it was the 
indolence from which he described himself as constitu- 
tionally suffering ; he was indolent, not lazy. He was 
a hard and regular worker; but when he had his 
choice of work, he could not take up what he felt 
to be difficult. Partly, too, the exigencies of money- 
making determined him, as his purchasers generally 
desired the kind of pictures that were supposed to 
be more typical of his genius. Whatever the causes 
may have been, he began to devote himself to small 
pictures without any particular depth of space or 
action, such as the two pictures Hamlet and Ophelia, 
one of which is a pen and ink drawing, the other 
a water-colour, and entirely different in treatment, 
Bonifazio's Mistress, Borgia, Paolo and Francesca, TJie 
Merciless Lady — pictures in which some dramatic 
moment is seized upon. Then he began to settle 
down into the production of the single-figure pictures, 
of which Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote that "apart 
from any question of technical shortcomings, one of 
Rossetti's strongest claims to the attention of posterity 
was that of having invented, in the three-quarter- 
length pictures painted from one face, a type of 
female beauty which was akin to none other, — which 
was entirely new, in short, — and which, for wealth of 
sublime and mysterious suggestion, unaided by complex 
dramatic design, was unique in the art of the world." 
This gradual shifting of tendency was, of course, 
more complex than can be precisely indicated, and it 
is additionally complicated by Possetti's frequent pro- 
duction of replicas of early works, or uncompleted 
designs, — as, for instance, when he took up in 1872 
a background of quiet woods and grass fields painted 



182 ROSSETTI [chap. 

at Sevenoaks in 1850, put in two women playing 
on musical instruments in the foreground, a castle 
tower with an open gallery on the right, and two 
dancing figures in the centre, and named it The Boiver 
Meadow. 

He was, of course, primarily a colourist, and in 
water-colour painting especially he produced effects 
that have never been equalled. The pure glow of 
colour, fearlessly and prodigally lavished, the daring 
contrasts, are his own. In 1865 he made the following 
interesting avowal of his colour preferences : — 

"Thinking in what order I love colours, found the 
following: (1) pure light warm green, (2) deep gold 
colour, (3) certain tints of grey, (4) shadowy or steel 
blue, (5) brown, with crimson tinge, (6) scarlet. 
Other colours (comparatively) only lovable according 
to the relations in which they are placed." He threw 
contemptuously aside all the code of rules about the 
exact proportions of colour to be observed which had 
held good before his day. What he felt on the subject 
of colour appears in an interesting letter written to 
McCracken in 1854 : — "I believe colour to be a quite 
indispensable quality in the highest art, and that no 
picture ever belonged to the highest order without it ; 
while many, by possessing it — as the works of Titian 
— are raised certainly into the highest class, though 
not to the very highest grade of that class, in spite 
of the limited degree of their other great qualities. 
Perhaps the only exception which I should be inclined 
to admit exists in the works of Hogarth, to which 
I should never dare to assign any but the very 
highest place, though their colour is certainly 
not a prominent feature in them. I must add, how- 



VII.] PAINTING 183 

ever, that Hogarth's colour is seldom other than 
pleasing to myself, and that for my own part, I should 
almost call him a colourist, though not aiming at 
colour. On the other haad, there are men who, 
merely on account of bad colour, prevent me from 
thoroughly enjoying their works, though full of other 
qualities. For instance, Wilkie, or Delaroche (in 
nearly all his works, though the Hemicyde is fine 
in colour). From Wilkie I would at any time prefer 
a thoroughly good engraving — though of course 
he is in no respect even within hail of Hogarth. 
Colour is the physiognomy of a picture ; and, like the 
shape of the human forehead, it cannot be perfectly 
beautiful without proving goodness and greatness. 
Other qualities are its life exercised ; but this is the 
body of its life, by which we know and love it at first 
sight." 

Neither was he afraid, in water-colour, of high 
lights, and let the white paper show in such effects, 
for instance, as the breaking of sunlight through 
the thick leaves of a wood, where many painters 
of his date would have indicated it by superimposed 
white. Intensity of colour he would have, and one 
who has often watched him at work has told me 
that, in days before moist colour was in use, he has 
seen Rossetti impatiently rub the cake of pigment on 
the picture to obtain a requisite brilliancy of tone. 
Ruskin, in the Art of England, says that Rossetti was 
much affected by studying the effects of illuminated 
Mss., and that the light of his pictures is often such 
fallen light as comes through stained glass ; but this 
would only apply to certain rich, dim pictures, where 
he seems to have aimed at a species of twilight effect, 



184 ROSSETTI [chap. 

as in the beautiful water-colour (1867), a replica of an 
earlier cartoon, of Sir Tristram and La Belle Yseult 
drinking the Love Potion. They stand in a dark deck- 
cabin, their heads outlined against a space of breezy- 
sunlit air and bright deck, with a magical light 
welling from the opened vial on the table between 
them. 

He was fond of painting effects of artificial light 
— Tibullus returning to Delia, with the lamp lit at 
evening, and the picture of Dr. Johnson at the Mitre, 
where the lantern, which is being trimmed by the 
waiter, struggles with a golden sunset without, below 
which lights twinkle in blue house-fronts. 

In his technical methods he formed certain habits 
of a very definite kind, and it must be said that he 
considered himself primarily an oil-painter, and that 
only commissions for water-colours had induced him 
to adopt that medium. He wrote to this effect to the 
Athenoeum in 1865, when a statement had been pub- 
lished that he had abandoned oil-painting. He had 
a very carefully mixed palette for oil-painting, which 
took nearly an hour to set out before beginning work, 
and had to be entirely cleaned every evening. All 
the later half-lengths were done in the same way : 
after the design was completed, it was drawn in 
thick red chalk on the canvas, and then the whole 
was covered with thick white paint mixed with copal 
varnish, so that the outline glimmered dimly through. 
The flesh was laid in a monochrome of ultramarine, 
which produced a peculiar grey shadow. Then, when 
the stiff white paint had dried, he carefully painted in 
from the life. 

It has been often said that he had but one type of 



VII.] PAINTING 185 

head, but this is a patent error. He painted from 
some fourteen models iu all. His wife's face was 
the first type he followed, and then the face of Mrs. 
Morris and several others, as Mrs. Schott, Miss Ford, 
Miss Miller, and Miss Spartali, afterwards Mrs. Still- 
man. But the mannerisms which grew upon him were 
those of the full lips and the long neck. I have seen 
three heads in chalk drawn from the same model at 
different dates, and it is curious to see how the 
exaggeration grows. The first is normal, and ex- 
quisitely beautiful; in the second the lips begin to 
protrude and the neck to lengthen ; in the last the lips 
have become almost like a butterfly with curved wings 
settled on the face, and the neck is sinuous, as the neck 
of a swan. But criticism was impossible ; he would 
have resented it and not have profited by it. 

As he grew older he lost to a certain extent the 
art of hand and eye; but the imagination and the 
mystical passion of expression, if anything, increased. 

Eossetti's pictures fall into several distinct classes : — 
The mediaeval religious pictures, such as The Girlhood 
of Mary Virgin, the Ecce Ancilla, and the centre of the 
David Triptych. The purely mediaeval pictures, rich 
in colour, such as King Arthur's Tomb, Sir Galahad, The 
Blue Closet, TJie Christmas Carol, Before the Battle. The 
whole Dante series. The small pictures representing 
some dramatic emotion, such as The Laboratory, How 
they met Tliemselves, Paolo and Francesca, TJie Merciless 
Lady, Tlie Madness of Ophelia, the two pictures called 
Lucrezia Borgia, Bonifazio's Mistress, the two pictures 
of Hamlet and Ophelia. Then there are the genre 
pictures, like Dr. Johnson, Found, Washing Hands, and 



186 ROSSETTI [chap. 

Tlie Gate of Memory. Then the symbolical pictures 
of single female figures, to which class most of the 
later great pictures belong ; and these again fall into 
two classes — those in which some tranquil and happy 
emotion is displayed, as in Tlie Beloved, Joli Coeur, The 
Loving Cup, The Day-Dream, Fiammetta, Bocca Baciata, 
and Belcolore, and those in which the emotion is of a 
mystical type, such as Beata Beatrix, Pandora, Proser- 
pine, Lilith, Veronica Veronese, Regina Cordium, Aurea 
Catena, Astarte Syriaca, and La Pia. Besides these 
there are pictures which cannot be exactly classified, 
such as the strange design of The Sphinx, which has 
a distinct reminiscence of Ingres, the great design for 
Cassandra, and others. There are also many portraits 
like those of his mother and sister and himself, 
Browning, Mr. Swinburne, and the Miss Siddal series. 
There are cartoons and woodcuts. 

A few words may be said of these in detail. The 
early mediaeval pictures have a great charm of their 
own, but are perhaps too distinctly of the nature 
of a reversion to a certain period of art. The stiff, 
decorative gestures, the naive grouping, the wealth 
of mediseval accessory — all seeming to yearn after a 
simpler and graver manner of life and thought. As 
James Smetham, a strange, melancholy being, said, 
writing of the Wedding of St. George, "one of the 
grandest things, like a golden dim dream. Love 
'credulous all gold,'^ gold armour, a sense of secret 
enclosure in ' palace-chambers far apart ' ; but quaint 
chambers in quaint palaces, where angels creep in 
through sliding-panel doors, and stand behind rows of 

1 Quoted from Milton's translation of Horace, Odes^ i. 5. 
Smetham slightly misapprehended the meaning of the line. 



VII.] PAINTING 187 

flowers, drumming on golden bells, with wings crimson 
and green." 

One feels that Eossetti was slowly, as it were, find- 
ing his way through this exotic kind of art to the 
true expression of his personality. Perhaps it was 
partly that before he had fully learned his limitations, 
conscious of the great difficulty which the render- 
ing of common things seen in the ordinary light of 
day presented to one impatient of technical training 
and eager for expression, he took refuge in these 
earlier and more simple effects of colour and design. 
He had not the facility of Millais or the patience of 
Mr. Holman Hunt. The Ecce Ancilla Domini is an 
attempt to present the scene more naturally. But 
in Found he realised his limitations, and great as the 
picture is both in conception and partially in execution, 
the contemplated alterations proved impossible ; and 
he wisely forbore to saddle his genius with conditions 
with which he could not deal. Perhaps the most 
elaborate of all these pictures, Fra Pace, may be 
described more in detail. 

This picture, a water-colour, was completed in 1856, 
and was at first in the possession of William Morris. 
It is worth the closest study, as it stands rather apart 
from all Rossetti's work, and is a salient instance of 
how his work might have developed if he had not 
been drawn by circumstances into the adoption of a 
settled manner. 

It represents a monk kneeling at a desk and making 
an illumination. The room in which he is at work is 
a kind of bedroom studio. Above the bed hangs a bell, 
the rope of which goes down through a large opening 
in the floor, by which the room seems to be entered, 



188 ROSSETTI [chap. 

and which gives a glimpse of a tiled passage below and 
a bit of landscape. The picture is full of abundance 
of quaint detail, somewhat archaic in character. On 
the side of the monk's desk hangs a little row of bottles 
of pigment ; on the window-ledge is a dead mouse, 
which he is drawing; close to his hand lies a slice 
of pomegranate, also probably serving as a model. On 
the tail of the monk's frock lies a cat asleep, and a 
cheerful little acolyte, with a mirthful smile, in a 
religious dress with embroidered collar and cuffs, is 
tickling it with a straw. But the charm of the picture 
is the face of the monk, thin and amiable, with sparse 
hair, the lips drawn up in the nicety of the work, 
the quiet eyelid falling over the eye, as he looks down- 
ward at his slender brush, held in a strong white 
hand. There is a tired half-smile on his face, but his 
complete absorption, together with the ordered look 
of the quiet room, with its signs of peaceful habita- 
tion, strike the note of cloistered calm and tranquil 
happiness. 

Eossetti never entirely deserted the Dante series; 
these pictures have a character of their own. They are 
formal in treatment, but not strictly mediaeval ; there 
is an attempt to combine a certain freedom of move- 
ment with a depth of grouping and dramatic emotion 
with which he could not wholly cope. The effect that 
they leave upon the mind is that the pictures are 
not duly subordinated to some central interest ; each 
figure, each portion of the picture seems in turn as 
you regard it to be the centre of the composition. 
They culminated in the Dante's Dream of 1870, which 
is considered by some to be his greatest picture, but 
which, massive, profound, and learned, in a sense, 



VII.] PAINTING 189 

as it is, fails somehow to bring one very close to the 
innermost personality of the man. 

Then come a number of pictures, mostly small 
water-colours, in which, though the handling is of a 
formal character, the stiffness of the more purely 
mediaeval designs is lost, as he gradually acquired a 
more secure mastery of his art. In such pictures there 
are generally but a few figures, and some moment of 
dramatic emotion is seized upon. Such is the Merci- 
less Lady, where a man sits in a little arbour looking 
out on woods, listening to the singing of a light- 
minded fairy-like maiden, utterly lost in the elfin 
charm of the soulless, childish grace, while his true 
love, with her face full of trouble, holds his listless 
hand, with hatred of her rival and grief at her own 
loss written legibly in the face. Such again is the 
Borgia of 1851. She sits languidly touching a lute, 
in an embroidered gown. The evil Pope Alexander VI. 
leans with a heavy, sensual look over her shoulder; 
her brother Ceesar stands on the left, beating time upon 
the table and blowing the rose-leaves from her hair. 
In the foreground, to the music, dance two children, a 
boy and a girl. The girl's face is full of a self-conscious 
charm, but looks as if corruption was entering into her 
spirit. The boy behind her moves gracefully, with 
crossed arms, watching the movements of the child, 
with an innocent face. The pathos of the scene is the 
thought of what these pretty children are doing in such 
a place ; and to what a bitter end the pursuit of 
seeming sweet pleasure may come, typified by the dark 
and marred faces behind. 

An interesting pair of pictures of this kind to 
compare are the two Hamlets of 1858 and 1866, In 



190 EOSSETTI [chap. 

the first, a pen and ink drawing, there is energy and 
passion in Hamlet's face, as he cries out his contempt 
for himself with his arms flung wide ; but Ophelia, 
tendering his letters to him with a stiff gesture, her 
head turned away, is obviously not studied from nature. 
The accessories are all of the most elaborate kind ; the 
scene is laid in an odd nook of carved wooden seats. 
The carving is curiously designed — a tree of know- 
ledge, encircled with a crowned serpent, and Uzzah 
falling lifeless from contact with the Ark — indicating 
doubtless, as by a parable, the perils of too close a 
contact with the guarded secrets of God ; behind is a 
strange serpentine staircase with double curves leading 
to a parapet. There is a want of balance about the 
conception, and the dramatic situation is blurred by 
the insistence on bizarre detail; but in the later 
picture, a water-colour, the detail is gone, and we are 
brought close to the passion of the scene. The two 
stand in a gallery ; he has caught her hand in both of 
his, and presses it to his lips, his face full of dark 
brooding ; she cannot bear to look him in the face, and 
a dim and hopeless sorrow, too desperate for tears, is 
written on her brow.^ 

Then there are a few distinctly genre pictures, such 
as Dr. Johnson at the Mitre, and Fotmd, which is one 
of Eossetti's greatest pictures. It was designed about 
1851, and he was working at it in 1854. But it was 
never completed, though commissioned by three or four 
successive purchasers. It represents a drover in the 
early morning driving into London a cart which con- 
tains a calf confined by a net. Near a bridge he finds 

1 This picture was not originally intended to represent 
Hamlet and Ophelia, but merely the parting of two lovers. 



vii.] PAINTING 191 

crouching on the pavement his early love, in the last 
stage of a life of degradation ; he tries to lift her vip, 
but she crouches away from him in abasement. The 
picture is full of fine symbolism, but the perspective of 
the bridge, and the very stones of the street, which might 
have been dealt with in Rossetti's earlier years, were 
impossibilities for him when he had lost the power, which 
he never possessed in any great degree, of jjainting in the 
open air. And the difficulties were increased by the fact 
that he thought the figures, as originally drawn, too 
short, and determined at a later date to lengthen them. 
There is left that strange series of beautiful half- 
length female figures, which to most people are all 
that is meant in art by the name of Rossetti. These 
are of two very distinct types : the earlier represent 
a sweet, untroubled, natural beauty, a beauty that is 
indeed a rare flower of life, and to the development of 
which would seem to have gone a freedom from care, 
months and years of seemly and guarded life, un- 
ruffled by anxiety and unshadowed by passion, desir- 
ing nothing out of measure. Such are the beautiful 
Belcolore, Bocca Baciata, TJie Loving Cup, Joli Coeur, and 
others. The proudest and sweetest of all is Fiammetta, 
who steps out with a radiant motion from the fresh 
apple-blossoms, the very spirit of lustrous youth, saved 
only from insolence by utter charm. These gracious 
creatures look out at the gazer with a tranquil and 
unconscious air of maiden thought, knowing nothing 
of the deeper shadows of life, of pain, and doom ; there 
is no mystery about their days ; they are like Nausicaa 
and Shirley, surrounded by the silent worship of gentle 
persons; they have "but fed on the roses and lain in 
the lilies of life." 



192 EOSSETTI [chap. 

But of the rest it is hard to speak, because the 
emotions they arouse are so intangible, so remote, that 
they pass beyond the reach of words. With some of 
them, indeed, one feels as if their mind was set on 
evil, as though they were determined to feed the 
flame of their desire with all delicate things in earth 
and heaven. Such is the Venus Verticordia, the per- 
fection of the beauty that is merely of the body, 
with the unashamed glance beneath the drooping lids ; 
such is Lilith, with her cold, strong face, shadowed 
by her hair, the room all flooded with roses and light. 
Such is La Bella Mano, for all the wistful innocence of 
her winged ministers. Such in a darker mood are the 
crayons, Tlie Lady with the Fan, and the Aiirea Catena, 
where the beauty cannot struggle out of the shade 
of sombre thought. Darker and deeper still is the 
Astarte Syriaca, robed in the green of a shoaling sea, 
with silver girdle, looking out of a blood-red sky, 
where the struggling moon is veiled. Here, indeed, 
the two attendants, with their torches and upward 
glance, seem to testify to some dark, unholy power the 
cruelty that is akin to lust. The strange sights that 
she has seen in grove and shrine seem to have fed her 
beauty with a lurid and terrible royalty, where she 
reigns in a dark serenity which nothing can appal. 

Then there is the Sea-Spell, with the barbarous 
harp, the very spirit of Nature's careless music, the 
piping of shrill winds, the moan of inarticulate waves. 
With this is associated the graceful Veronica Veronese, 
the nymph of earthly music, who, with the languid air 
of one who pursues an impossible dream, seems to 
desire to translate the shrill bird's song into the 
language of the tense string. 



VII.] PAINTING 193 

But there are three pictures of this class that leave 
the deepest impression in the mind. One is the 
Proserpine, the picture that was wrought through such 
a series of calamities. Deeply mannerised though 
it is, the face has in it the proud bearing of irreparable 
doom, the empire of sorrow that has become a part of 
life ; that caunot touch the radiance of divine beauty, 
but has left its mark in the eyes that seem to be as 
dark wells into which all the pain of the world has 
streamed. 

Another is Pandora, with her metal casket from 
which the red smoke streams. She seems to be rather 
the spirit of terror incarnate ; she is a beautiful witch 
who has seen all that the world holds of fear, and 
has yet divined what is august and awe-inspiring in 
terror, casting from her all the meaner attributes, all 
shrinking cowardice and craven dismay. 

But perhaps the noblest of all these heads is the 
Beata Beatrix, of which Kossetti himself said that no 
picture ever cost him so much pain in painting, but 
at the same time he had never been more conscious of 
mastery in art.^ The face is his wife's ; and it was 
the first time after her death that he allowed himself 
to recall it. It is the symbol of the death of the 
body, " not," as he said, '' intended at all to represent 
death, but to render it under the semblance of a 
trance in which . . . she is suddenly rapt from earth 
to heaven." It is one of the pictures of Rossetti's 
where the subordination is perfect. The dial, the 
listening figures behind, the crimson dove, divert no 

1 There are no known studies for the Beata Beatrix. The 
supposed studies are later. He probably used some studies 
made for Hie Beturn of Tihullus, 




194 ROSSETTI [chap. 

pleased attention from the upturned face, with the 
soft, golden light playing over the waxen features 
from which life seems withdrawn. But there is 
no threatening of mortality to mar the vision, and 
the face is the face of one whose heart's desire is 
fulfilled beyond the reach of hope. 

A few words may be said about his work in illus- 
trating books. Some dozen such illustrations exist in 
all. One is an illustration for W. AUingham's Day 
and Night Songs, 1855. Five appear in the illustrated 
Tennyson published by Moxon in 1857, and four 
appear in two books by his sister Christina, Goblin 
Market and The Prince's Progress, published in 1862 
and 1866. 

The Tennyson illustrations are the most interesting, 
especially that for the Lady of Shalott, where Lancelot, 
pale and sad, bends down from a stairway descending 
on the river to the barge, where the maiden lies under 
a wooden hooding bearing lighted candles; but the 
design is crowded, and it is lacking in contrast and 
airy quality. Much the most carefully finished one is 
that to the Palace of Art, an extraordinarily intricate 
design full of little incidents that have no existence in 
the poem. St. Cecily kneels at an organ with hands 
laid on the keys, with the head thrown back in the 
embrace of a strange, wild figure more pilgrim than 
angel. The scene is laid in a beleaguered city guarded 
and mounted with cannon, and a sea in the back- 
ground crowded with great ships. In the foreground 
is a soldier eating an apple as he guards a dungeon on 
the platform of which kneels the saint. 

Of this picture Rossetti humorously wrote that 
he was going to try a subject '' where one can alle- 



VII.] PAINTING 195 

gorise on one's own hook on the subject of the poem, 
Avithout killing for oneself and every one a distinct 
idea of the poet's." 

In the illustrations to his sister's poems there is 
much charm, particularly in the picture Buy from us 
ivith a golden curl, where the girl clips a lock of her 
hair to pay for the fruits brought by the odd creatures 
of the wood. There is a great deal of humour in the sly, 
wheedling looks of the grotesque animals, especially in 
the solemn frog which tries to press in at the back, 
and the wombat in the foreground in a species of 
sleepy ecstasy. 

Perhaps the most beautiful of all is the frontis- 
piece, etched, but fastidiously rejected, for The Early 
Italian Poets (1861). This picture, representing a 
kneeling lover, whose lady bends to kiss him, gives, 
with simple lines, the effect of the purest emo- 
tion entirely removed from any sensuous associa- 
tion. 

Eossetti was one of those natures which are entirely 
dominated and penetrated by the beauty of the world, 
and his whole life was devoted to the expression of 
this haunting and almost torturing consciousness. 
I do not think that there is any evidence that he 
looked upon himself as an interpreter or prophet of 
beauty to others ; and one of the many mysteries of 
his strange life is the fact that he possessed such a 
curious power over the lives and minds of others, 
without apparently having any desire to exert this in- 
fluence. It seems never to have been consciously ex- 
erted even over those within his immediate circle ; as 
for those without, I do not imagine that he regarded 



196 ROSSETTI [chap. 

them at all. He lived in the spirit of Horatian 
thought — 

" Odi prof anum vulgus et arceo ; 
Favete linguis ! carmina non prius 
Audita, Musarum sacerdos 
Virginibus puerisque canto." 

The virgines puerique of Rossetti's audience were 
all those who could look past the sordid pursuits of 
the world and keep their eye steadily fixed on beauty 
in her inmost shrine. 

But it was for Rossetti one special form of beauty 
that thus stung and overpowered his spirit. Just as 
in the case of Morris it was the love of the kindly and 
gracious earth, as to Browning it was the complicity 
and grandeur of human motive, as to Mr. Holman 
Hunt it has been a stern sense of the Divine, to Ros- 
setti it was the beauty of the human face, as the sub- 
limest form of loveliness that the dreaming spirit of 
nature could conceive. Earth and the things of earth 
touched him only as sweet accessories to this central 
beauty, the purest, fairest, and divinest thing that the 
earth can hold. 

But this beauty is not, as Rossetti understood it, an 
end in itself ; it is not the sense of desirous possession 
that is stirred by it, but rather it is a deep-seated thirst 
for the mystery, whatever it may be, that hides beneath 
and beyond it. It is the beauty that brings with it awe 
and reverence and honour, and a sense of kinship with 
immortal and everlasting things, not dwelling on the 
figure but the face. 

I imagine that there is something of the same feel- 
ing in the minds of the most exalted moralists. What 
draws them to virtue is not a philosophical, reasoned 



vii.] PAINTING 197 

sense of the merits of virtue and its usefulness in 
compacting the framework of life into stability and 
serviceableness. It is rather the haunting passion of 
the beauty of virtue of which Wordsworth speaks in 
the Ode to Duty ; — 

" Nor know we anything so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face." 

A noble deed, a splendid piece of self-sacrifice, a 
triumph of justice over tyranny — these have the same 
constraining attractiveness for the highest souls that 
beauty has for the artist ; they are all messages from 
some distant fortress of God, from some abstract city 
built on foundations of amethyst and with gates of 
pearl. Such a passion for virtue cannot be learned, 
hardly instilled; though those in whom it exists in 
a dim and imperfect form may by faithful effort 
learn to imitate what at first they only half-heartedly 
admire. 

Thus we should welcome gladly among us the advent 
and passage of all clear-sighted souls, who live not as 
others live for the moment, but under the dominion 
of some high and eternal idea. We may think that 
the passion for what is beautiful in conduct is the 
highest range of which the human spirit is capable, 
and we may regret the devotion to an art which does 
not end in the ennobling of human character. But 
who could say that those who live laboriously faithful 
to the pure vision of beauty in art do not tend to 
the uplifting of the human spirit higher? It may 
not be, as Myers wrote, so "manifestly akin to 
virtue"; but anything deserves praise which is a 
protest against materialism, against gross and animal 



198 ROSSETTI [chap. 

views of life, against the seductions of comfort, against 
all limited satisfaction. I would claim for Eossetti's 
art that it is essentially of this kind. It does not 
aim at satisfying, and surely it is an incredible view 
which would see in it a merely sensual outlook. 
Sensuous it may be, nay, is bound to be, because it 
is the very strangeness and mystery of love that the 
passion which is most remote in its significance, most 
enthralling in its suddenness, which brings a touch 
of divineness into the most brutish life, should be so 
inextricably interwoven with the fiercest assaults of 
the animal nature. 

But it is to no mere love-dalliance, no temporary 
thrill of pleasure, no gross vehemence of passion which 
drinks and passes on ungrateful and heedless, to which 
these strange and dreamful visions of Rossetti call us. 
They draw us rather to that strange sense of haunt- 
ing desire which is, as it were, so incommunicable in 
essence that it can only be expressed in types and 
hints and far-off dreams. Those who know the in- 
expressible thrill which invades the mind at the 
sight of some dewy wood-end seen from an opened 
casement in the silent freshness of dawn, or the 
thickening tide of twilight, when the wood stands 
black against the green depth of sky ; or the sight 
of the secret glade, muffled in leaves, and carpeted, 
as by some sweet conspiracy, with the drooping 
sweetness of spring hyacinths ; or who have watched 
the twilight flying and flaring to the west over miles 
of quiet country, when the mind asks itself what is 
the strange and blissful secret that it seems upon the 
verge of guessing — it is to these that the faces that 
look so sorrowfully, so seriously, out of the pictures of 



VII.] PAINTING 199 

Rossetti, speak. It is not even the frank and childish 
appetite of seeing the thing beautifully portrayed which 
we can win from these pictures ; the least critical can 
see the lack of mastery, the mannerism, the want of 
draughtsmanship, under the magnificence of colour 
that they display. Rossetti was too intent upon 
setting forth his visions to master the technical secrets 
of painting. 

It may be said that all this kind of art is es- 
sentially outside experience and therefore unwhole- 
some. Such is the argument of the conventional man, 
the Philistine, the Roman, and to that it can only be 
replied that those on whom such pictures of Rossetti's 
exercise no attractive and dreamful quality will do 
best to leave them aloue. They will not reveal their 
charm to the inquisitive. Neither, again, should we 
sympathise with the spirit that found its ultimate 
satisfaction in such art as this. The region of the 
dreamer is a dangerous one in which to linger ; in 
the old stories it would befall the man who loved 
to wander alone on trackless hills to see suddenly 
some strange vision which unfitted him to return 
to the common life of man, while at the same time 
he could find no words to tell what it was that 
had visited his sight. It sent him forth to wander 
unsatisfied and haggard in lonely places; and this 
loneliness, this remoteness, is the danger of all who 
yield themselves too recklessly to the pursuit and 
contemplation of the mystery which lends little inner 
happiness to the spirit. But, on the other hand, to 
be blind to this kind of beauty is to be blind to an 
undoubted and potent vision ; it is to be materialistic, 
to be limited, to be heedless of the huge secrets that 



200 EOSSETTI [chap. 

lie all about us on every hand. To heed them, to 
follow them warily, to love them is not to be unmanly, 
or slothful, or vague, so long as these emotions do not 
absorb, but quicken and elevate the soul. 

There are two totally distinct views of Art : one 
that would regard it, in whatever form it comes, as 
an agreeable accessory to life and no more — " after 
the banquet the minstrel " ; that is the view of the 
uninitiated, the Philistine, the man in the street, and 
all those that are without. 

But again there is the inner view of those to whom 
Art is a strange and enchanted country of dreaming 
woodland, league upon league, with here and there 
the tower of some haunted abode looking over into 
the silent glades ; here wanders a spirit, finger on 
lip but with a questioning smile. The story of the 
place to those who have ever set foot within it seems 
a foolish tale, like the murmur of the wind or the 
ripple of the stream, vague and meaningless. 

But it is not to be entered heedlessly. It is like 
the Woods of Westermain — 

*' Enter these enchanted woods, 

Ye who dare. ... ; 

These, the woods of Westermain, 
Are as others to behold, 
Rich of wreathing sun and rain ; 
Foliage lustreful around 
Shadowed leagues of slumbering sound." 

But the head must be cool and the heart clean to 
walk there without danger ; here have perished many 
strong and beautiful souls ; and it were better not to 
set foot at all within the sunlit glades than to tread 
carelessly. For though you may return, yet to have 



VII.] PAINTING 201 

tasted of the joys and terrors of the place will unfit 
you for the simpler life of man ; but those who can 
walk warily can go and come, and bring back fruits 
like the grapes of Eshcol and star-flowers of Paradise 
to refresh the wayfarers of the world who may not 
enter. 



CHAPTER VIII 

CHARACTER 

In attempting to draw Rossetti's cliaracter it is 
necessary to remember tliat we are not dealing with 
an English type at all. It is hard to sketch him 
in English tones, not only because his temperament 
was so intricate and many-sided, but from its intensity 
and force. As Ruskin wrote in Prceterita, "Rossetti 
was really not" an Englishman, but a great Italian 
tormented in the Inferno of London." Deepest down 
lay a mystical passion for the beauty which culminates 
in the human form, which, like everything else in the 
man, was not a sentiment but a strong constraining 
influence. He was strongly susceptible to feminine 
charm, and had a correspondingly strong influence 
over women ; but to confuse this with mere sensuous 
impulse would be a grave mistake. To him the forms 
of human loveliness were in themselves dear and 
adorable, but they were only, so to speak, the first steps 
in a shining stairway that led among the stars ; they 
were but the alphabet of a passion whose finished 
scrolls were written by the very finger of God. It is 
difficult for English minds adequately to conceive the 
remote and dimly apprehended possibilities which for 
Rossetti lay behind material forms of beauty, and to 

202 



CHAP. VIII.] CHAKACTER 203 

gauge the depth of the secret of which hints were 
written in the precise forms of hands and lips and 
eyes. 

But side by side with this mystical hunger of the 
soul, there existed in Rossetti what is not generally 
found in combination with it. He had an intellectual 
nature of extraordinary vividness, a hard mental force 
which gained in strength from the extremely definite 
limitations of his mind. He took no interest in 
politics, history, metaphysics, or science, and the whole 
strength of an acute and penetrating intellect was given 
to art and poetry. He was contemptuously impatient 
of talk on such subjects as I have indicated, which 
were to him utterly barren and arid. Yet those who 
knew him best always held that the man was infinitely 
greater than his work, which carelessly and inevitably 
radiated from him, hurled out from an inner restless- 
ness. The medium in which he worked, whether words 
or colours, was a hindrance rather than a help to him. 

Although his genius was creative rather than imita- 
tive, he had a great power of relentless observation — 
no foible or characteristic in his friends escaped him. 
He had the same penetrative insight in dealing with 
books. His library was small, but he valued quality 
in a book above everything. His interest in china, 
furniture, ohjets d'cwi was just the same — intensely 
critical, pungent, sharp-sighted. The same quality 
came out in the financial ability which he possessed. 
He had an eye, says Mr. Mackail, for anything with 
money in it. Though profuse, generous, and extrava- 
gant with money, he valued it as a power, as meaning 
freedom. His income was very considerable, and he 
displayed the least attractive side of his nature in his 



204 ROSSETTI [chap. 

acute bargaining. I put this down largely to the 
restrictions in the matter of money under which he 
grew to maturity. A haunting sense of poverty in 
early years is apt to make a generous nature too heed- 
ful of gain and to give an exaggerated idea of the 
necessity of money as an accessory to life. 

It is impossible to insist too strongly on a certain 
element in Rossetti's character which can only be 
described as a natural kingliness. He had an ab- 
solutely dominant nature, not a deep-seated force of 
will, but a personal dominance. He was master of 
the moment, of the scene, of the company ; every one 
who encountered him, and he was surrounded by a 
number of highly original personalities, bowed to this 
influence. He was the undisputed sovereign of any 
group in which he found himself. His brother writes : 
" He was a genial despot, good-naturedly hearty and 
unassuming in manner and only tenacious upon the 
question at issue." For the sake of his affection and 
generosity his friends forgave him a great deal of in- 
considerateness in details, which was very characteristic 
of his early life. Thus Madox Brown's journal for the 
end of 1854 gives an incisive picture of Eossetti, who 
was supposed to be painting Found. In the course of 
November Eossetti was quartered at Finchley, where 
Brown was then living in considerable poverty with 
his wife, who was expecting her confinement. Brown 
says pathetically that Eossetti sleeps in their parlour, 
a bed being made up on the floor, and will not get up 
till eleven o'clock ; that he makes very slow progress 
with the calf, painting hair by hair, " all the time he 
wearing my great-coat, which I want, and a pair of my 
breeches " ; requiring unlimited supplies of food and 



VIII.] CHARACTER 205 

turpentine, and quite impervious to hints that his 
presence was inconvenient. " I told him delicately he 
must go, or go home at night by the 'bus. This he 
said was too expensive. I told him he might ride to 
his work in the morning, and walk home at night. 
This he said he should never think of." 

These extracts bring out very strongly both the 
inconsiderate self-will of Rossetti, and his apparent 
indifference to the convenience of others. It can hardly 
have been want of perception, but I suppose was rather 
an intense and self-absorbed pre-occupation in his own 
work and thoughts. Still more remarkable is the 
fact that Madox Brown seems not to have resented it, 
hardly to have questioned Rossetti's right to behave 
as he did. He prays for deliverance, as from the will 
of some peremptory monarch, rather than asserts his 
equality and social rights. 

This magnetism dominated Morris absolutely for a 
time, it determined the art of Burn e- Jones, it upset 
Euskin, it profoundly affected Mr. Swinburne's poetry. 
His influence was not consciously exerted; it is a 
mistake to think of Rossetti as a proselytiser. He laid 
no snares for other natures ; but in his presence his 
conceptions and aims naturally presented themselves to 
others as the conceptions and aims most worth striving 
for. He was intensely affectionate, a loyal friend, an 
irresistible comrade. He took no account of anything 
but the charm and enthusiasm of the character he was 
brought into contact with, so that for him social dis- 
tinctions did not exist. He never conceived himself 
bound to sympathise with another point of view — 
indeed the possibility of doing so did not enter his 
mind | when he said a thing, it was to be. " I was one 



206 KOSSETTI [chap. 

of those," he once wrote, " whose little is their own." 
This directness of energy, combined with the fact that 
he was also strangely and wonderfully attractive in 
himself, had an irresistible power over other minds, 
above all, over minds in search of an ideal. 

The cause, I think, of so many broken friendships in 
his life was not, as has been suggested, Eossetti's own 
capriciousness, nor the morbidity of his later years, 
nor even the sad circumstances of his life. It was 
rather that his friends were often men of strong in- 
dividuality, such as Morris, Euskin, and others, and 
that they felt themselves overpowered and dominated 
by Eossetti in a way which made easy intercourse 
difficult and uncomfortable. As Madox Brown, writ- 
ing after Eossetti's death, said, " I find now what 
I was scarcely conscious of before, that I used to 
paint always with a vague idea of his approbation 
in the distance." There were not, as a rule, any sharp 
and definite ruptures of friendship ; it was rather 
that his associates felt themselves in the presence of 
a man whose strength of will overpowered and over- 
whelmed their own marked characteristics, and ex- 
pected a natural submission which they were not 
prepared to concede, which might be borne for a time 
while they were under the spell, but which was bound 
to cease in the natural course of development. His 
friends were as a rule originally attracted to Eossetti 
by his powerful charm ; but close and intimate 
alliances between men of very salient and marked 
characteristics seldom stand the strain of prolonged 
association. Those friends who remained faithful to 
Eossetti were mostly men of gentler mould, who did 
not run counter to his preferences and prejudices, and 



Tin.] CHARACTER 207 

who remained under the fascination of his generous 
and enthusiastic personality, witliout wishing to assert 
themselves. 

There is something very remarkable in the spectacle 
presented by the closing years. Rossetti appears 
surrounded by what was almost a little court of 
followers, who laid out their time to suit him, came to 
him at times when he desired to have company, and 
cheerfully sacrificed their own convenience to serve 
his needs. He appears hardly to have appreciated 
this to the full, though these devoted friends seem to 
have been amply repaid by the royal and generous 
recognition of their services which he from time to 
time rendered them. Something of a tragic pity for 
the doom under which their hero lay, perhaps im- 
parted a deeper quality to this devotion. Many a 
man in Rossetti's position, morbid, self-indulgent, 
wilfully pursuing his own way reckless of conse- 
quences, would have been sternly abandoned to his 
own devices ; but the glimpses that one gets of the 
later years in the pages of Mr. William Rossetti's 
book have something that is singularly impressive and 
touching. The object of their devotion lies ill and 
indifferent, under the spell of a terrible drug, im- 
patient of pain, while the faithful friends in sad 
conclave make arrangements for his comfort, select 
a place for his retreat, settle the relays of vigilant and 
untiring companions to accompany him, disregard their 
own occupations, with an entire unconsciousness that 
they are displaying any marked degree of self- 
sacrifice. 

"What a supreme man is Rossetti!" wrote Philip 
Bourke Marston, the blind poet, in 1873. " Why is 



208 ROSSETTI [chap. 

he not some great exiled king, that we might give our 
lives in trying to restore him to his kingdom ? " 

This was exactly the spirit in which his friends did 
serve him. It is like the story of some dethroned 
monarch, surrounded by adherents who make the 
misfortunes of their leader a reason for lavishing on 
him the care and devotion which they would hardly 
have conceded to him if he had been prosperous and 
regnant. This is not the spirit of a coterie, but 
something of a much larger and deeper kind, based on 
a consciousness of the man's greatness and natural 
royalty. 

Mr. Gosse, who as a very young man was introduced 
into the circle, says that the personal impressiveness of 
Eossetti can hardly be exaggerated. The difficulties 
in the way of seeing him, the secrecy preserved about 
his pictures, so that it was possible to be a frequent 
visitor to the house and yet rarely to be allowed to 
visit the studio, all enhanced the air of mystery. But 
the man himself, short, stout, careless in dress, un- 
affected in discourse, seemed yet to carry with him 
a certain pontifical greatness, as though he were the 
very high-priest of beauty, and held the key to the 
innermost mysteries of art. " And all this," as Mr. 
Gosse wrote, " without a single touch of the prophetic 
manner, the air of such professional seers as Coleridge 
or Carlyle." This sense was enhanced and not 
diminished by the entire absence of aesthetic pretence, 
by Eossetti's simple manners and easy, indifferent 
habits, by the rich, resonant voice, which aroused an 
almost physical vibration in his hearers. 

This personal dominance was sustained by the 
splendid appreciation which he always showed of the 



VIII.] CHARACTER 209 

work of others. He had not a particle of jealousy 
in his composition; and the lavish commendation 
which he was always ready to bestow upon the 
artistic productions of friends and rivals was one 
of the sources of his influence. There is, indeed, in 
these early days, abundant evidence of small, trouble- 
some, detailed kindnesses, lavished upon his friends 
with a profusion which a selfish character could never 
have attained to. He takes an editor and a leading 
contributor of a weekly to see a friend's pictures ; 
he writes a long article in the same paper pointing 
out the merits of the pictures in question ; he brings 
possible purchasers half across London to see the 
same; or a picture in an exhibition by an unknown 
man strikes him as having merit ; he insists that a 
moneyed friend should buy it ; he secures a good notice 
for it in the Times ; he takes Ruskin to see it. As 
Ford Madox Brown, in a time of great discouragement, 
wrote : " Eeally Gabriello seems bent upon making 
my fortune at one blow. Never did fellow, I think, 
so bestir himself for a rival before ; it is very good and 
very great to act so." And again : — 

" No one ever perhaps showed such a vehement dis- 
position to proclaim any real merit if he thinks he 
discovers it in an unknown or rising artist. ... I 
could narrate a hundred instances of the most noble 
and disinterested conduct towards his art-rivals, which 
places him far above [others] in his greatness of soul, 
and yet he will, on the most trivial occasion, hate and 
backbite any one who gives him offence." 

To the very end of his life, says one who knew him 
well, nothing was more remarkable than the attention 
he was always prepared to give to the artistic and 



210 KOSSETTI [chap. 

literary work of unknown men. William Morris, in 
the later years of estrangement, is said to have held 
that Rossetti's deepest fault of character was his un- 
alloyed selfishness ; but William Morris had always 
been far more absorbed in his own pursuits than 
Rossetti was, and treated the work of others, unless 
it were of a kind that specially appealed to himself, 
with unconcealed impatience. Eossetti, on the con- 
trary, was almost invariably ready, except in a whim- 
sical mood, to consider a picture or a poem respectfully, 
to praise its merits, to criticise helpfully, even to alter 
and amend, if he could ; and this characteristic never 
deserted him. 

There was, too, no tendency to condescension about 
him; he did not think of his own prestige, but put 
any young man, in whom he discerned loftiness of 
aim and high artistic intention, on a level with him- 
self and other experienced workers. 

Together with this was a readiness to give advice, 
absorbed as he was in his own work, on any matter in 
which he felt he could be of use. To give one out 
of many such instances, there is preserved an early 
letter, full of practical sense and kindliness, to his 
aunt, who had asked his advice as to how to begin to 
teach drawing to a small class of entirely unpractised 
amateurs. He suggests the minute copying of a piece 
of mossy bark, in pencil and then in colour ; he offers 
to look over the result and criticise, to procure suitable 
casts for models and materials, and to send them. All 
this is very different from the moody seclusion of later 
years, self-absorbed and irresolute. But we must 
again and again remind ourselves that the latter was 
not the real Rossetti. Even then, weakened and 



VIII.] CHARACTER 211 

enslaved as he was by his pernicious habit, he was for 
ever accessible to any personal appeal that could 
penetrate his seclusion, and apt to discharge offices 
of tenderness and solicitude for any of the narrowing 
circle that surrounded him. 

What throws a beautiful light upon Eossetti's 
character is the profound tenderness and filial devotion 
which he displayed to his mother throughout his life. 
His letters to her, of Avhich many are published, have 
a sweetness and a deliberate cheerfulness that show 
not only how deeply rooted his affection was, but what 
capacities for self-sacrificing loyalty there lay in his 
nature. He addressed her often in odd pet names 
of his own devising : " Good Antique," " Dear good 
Antique," " Dear old Darling of 70," " Dearest 
Darling," and so forth. And such letters as the 
following show the nature of the tie that bound 
them : — 

"... I have only got your letter this morning. It would 
be absurd iu me to thank you for another proof of the 
affection which you have lavished on me all my life, and 
which is often but too little deserved. I am most ashamed 
of my disgraceful silence all the time I have been at Oxford ; 
but I am getting worse than ever as a letter-writer, though 
this should hardly apply in your dear case." 

" May 12, 1868. 
" The reminder of the solemn fact that I am a man of forty 
now could hardly come agreeably from anyone but yourself. 
But, considering that the chief blessing of my forty good and 
bad years has been that not one of them has taken you from 
me, it is the best of all things to have the same dear love and 
good wishes still coming to me to-day from your dear hand 
at a distance as they would have done from your dear mouth 
had we seen each other. This we shall again soon, I trust." 



212 ROSSETTI [chap. 

" Penkill, 1868. 
" Good Antique, — ... I have just got your dear letter, 
and one from William. In yours I think 1 detect a funny 
old intention of writing large for the benefit of my sight. 
This would be quite in the Antique spirit." 

It was the same with the other members of his 
family. The long series of letters to his brother 
William show the fraternal relation at its best ; they 
are absolutely natural and simple, but there is none 
of the gruffness or curtness which often creeps into 
fraternal communications. Thus he wrote to his 
brother in 1872, after his recovery from the saddest 
of his illnesses : — 

" I know well how much you must have suffered on 
my account ; indeed perhaps your suffering may have 
been more acute than my own dull nerveless state 
during the past months. Your love, dear William, 
is not less returned by me than it is sweet to me, and 
that is saying all." 

From the first there was in the family circle a habit 
of outspoken and demonstrative affection which was 
characteristic of their Italian origin. I cannot refrain 
from quoting a letter written at an early date to 
D. G. Rossetti by his father, which shows that the 
affection of the household was not left unexpressed, to 
be taken for granted, as is perhaps not unusual among 
English families. The letter runs : — 

" Frome, 4<^ October 1853. 

" For some while past I have been feeling a strong impulse 
to write to you, my dearly beloved son; and to-day I will 
obey this imperious inner voice. . . . 

" I am extremely pleased at the progress which you are 
making in your beautiful art, and at some profits which you 
are earning from it to maintain yourself with decorum in 



viii.] CHARACTER 213 

society. Remember, my dearly loved son, that you have only 
your abilities to rely upon for your welfare. Remember that 
you were born with a marked propensity, and that, from your 
earliest years, you made us conceive the brightest hopes that 
you would become a great painter. 

" And such you will be, I am certain. . . ." 

It is encouraging and uplifting in dealing with a 
character like Rossetti's to find the fire of tender 
affection burn so clear in the innermost sanctuary ; 
it allays the suspicion that self-absorption and artistic 
pre-occupation had dried up the sources of tender- 
ness. It is profoundly affecting to realise that the 
pure spring of natural affection ran clear and untainted 
all through his troubled days, and that he clung to 
the love of his childish years. Nor was he merely 
content that this should be lavished upon him. The 
letters show that he dwelt much upon the thought 
of his mother, and kept up a constant and regular 
correspondence with her, as though he had been a 
boy at school craving for the atmosphere of affection 
that surrounded him at home. His affection for his 
friends was only less strong and generous than his 
affection for his family. He would banter them 
robustly and unmercifully ; but he had an extreme dis- 
like, incisive though his wit was, of giving pain to any 
one. A letter written to Madox Brown in 1866 reflects 
a wonderful depth of affection : — 

" Nothing, on reflection, could pain me more (though 
certainly I did so in a way to which I ought not to 
have been blind) than to inflict the slightest pain on 
you, whom I regard as so much the most intimate and 
dearest of my friends, that I might call you by com- 
parison the only one I have. ... To refer to another 



214 EOSSETTI [chap. 

point (having said all that seems possible in confes- 
sion of how much I was to blame), I may say that the 
suggestion of any possible obligation from you to me 
seriously distresses me. Not because I think you 
attribute to me thoughtlessness in any degree to such 
a view on my own part, for of that you acquit me by 
word as well as I should in any case have known 
by thought; but because if you can disregard, as I 
know you do, the great obligations under which you 
have laid me in early life, and which were real ones, 
as involving real troubles to yourself undertaken for 
the sake of one who was quite a stranger to you at the 
outset — what can / think of a matter which gives' me 
no trouble whatever, and in which, were I inactive, I 
should sin against affection, gratitude, and, liighest of 
all, conviction as an artist ? " 

And again in 1874 he writes to Madox Brown : — 
"The better I am, the more intensely I feel your 
friendship in word and deed. I need not doubt that 
you have pardoned any feeble petulance of my late 
ailing condition." 

And very characteristic of him it was to make the 
alteration which he did in the sonnet on the clergy- 
man who destroyed Shakespeare's Mulberry Tree. The 
concluding lines ran — 

" Whose soul is carrion now, — too mean to yield 
Some tailor's ninth allotment of a ghost." 

He altered the word " tailor " into " starveling," to the 
great detriment of the pungency of the allusion, for 
fear of " hurting the feelings of some sensitive member 
or members of the tailoring craft who might dislike 
the line in its original wording." 

One other feature of this generosity of character 



vni.] CHARACTER 215 

must be touched upon : his extraordinary liberality 
and kindness in the matter of material help. In his 
use of money he had a certain magnificence; and 
though he was inconsiderate and even unscrupulovis 
when dealing with purchasers, and in some cases with 
friends in matters of finance, yet the instinct of gen- 
erosity was unfailing. It mattered not who it was — a 
friend, an acquaintance, a complete stranger. The 
pressure of visible distress always appealed instantly 
to Rossetti's heart. Not only would he give away any 
money of which he was possessed, but he had no scruple 
in borrowing from his friends for the same purpose. 
In early days he was not particular about repayment, 
and a temporary alienation, which was quite erroneously 
supposed to have arisen between himself and his brother 
William, was laughingly explained by a friend, who 
said that William Kossetti was obliged to be careful, 
as whenever he met his brother he was called upon 
to produce any available coin that he had upon him. 
Among innumerable instances of his ready kindness, 
one will suffice. On reaching home after his wedding 
tour he heard of the death of a yovmg painter named 
Brough, who had left a wife and two little children. 
Rossetti knew that the widow would be practically 
destitute. He had spent all his own money; but a 
certain portion had been invested in jewellery for 
Mrs. Rossetti, who fully sympathised with the trouble 
in question ; so that when they reached London they 
did not go straight home, but drove first to a pawn- 
broker, and then to Mrs. Brough's lodgings, and after 
that home, " with entirely empty pockets ; but, I 
expect," says Arthur Hughes, who tells the story, 
"with two very full hearts." 



216 EOSSETTI [chap. 

A great deal of harm was done to tlie cause which 
Eossetti represented, the whole-hearted pursuit of 
beauty, by the affectations and absurdities introduced, 
after his death, by a certain group of self-elected 
followers, the epigoni who took up in a self-conscious 
and superficial way the ideas which were popularly 
supposed to have actuated his teaching, and used them 
as a means of gaining notoriety and social distinction. 
The so-called aesthetic school, satirised in Punch under 
the figures of Postlethwaite and Maudle, were no doubt 
in a degree sincere. They professed to refer all things 
to the standard of the Beautiful, but their devotion 
was tainted partly by the fact that they made these 
principles an excuse for lowering the moral standard, 
and partly because they desired above all things 
monstrari digito, to be pointed out as daring innovators 
and contemners of existing conventions. The result 
was that the originators of the aesthetic movement were 
credited with all sorts of affectations which not only 
formed no part of their scheme, but which were entirely 
alien to their whole spirit. It cannot, however, be said 
that the principles of the movement have in any way 
profoundly affected or influenced the national life and 
feeling ; and the net result of the school, apart from a 
temporary quickening of the artistic conscience, and 
an enhancing of the dignity of art, has been of a 
decorative kind, and has mainly succeeded in raising 
the general level of domestic taste. 

It is a strange instance of the irony of fate that the 
affectations of unworthy imitators should be charged 
upon the original founders of the movement. They 
were rather sedulously unaffected. "I canH get on 
with men who are not men of the world," Rossetti said 



viii.] CHAEACTER 217 

in 1864 to his brother. The Pre-Raphaelites spoke 
no artistic jargon, but rather preferred a short, crisp, 
vernacular, slangy vocabulary. " Stunning " was a 
favourite adjective where their imitators spoke of 
''precious." Rossetti frequents the British Museum 
in order to find " stunning words " for poetry, and a 
friendly waitress at an eating-house was known as the 
" cordial stunner." Mr. Holman Hunt says that while 
Rossetti " worthily rejoiced in the poetic atmosphere 
of the sacred and spiritual dreams that then encircled 
him," " some of his noisy demonstrations at the time 
might hinder this from being recognised by a hasty 
judgment." Rossetti had a taste in talk for strong 
vernacular expressions. " You'd better collar it," " I 
expect I cribbed it from her," — it was thus that he 
preferred to talk. Rossetti, writing to Alliugham in 
August 1854, says, "I have got out my work this 
morning, but it looks so hopelessly beastly, and I feel 
so hopelessly beastly, that I must try to revive myself 
before beginning, by some exercise that goes quicker 
than the Fine Arts." Dr. Birkbeck Hill says that he 
was present at a discussion at Oxford, when Rossetti 
was engaged upon the Union frescoes, when the latter 
maintained that a young and lovely woman, who was 
on her trial on a charge of murdering her lover, ought 
not to be hanged even if found guilty, because she was 
" such a stunner ! " Mr. Hill took the opposite view. 
"Oh, Hill," said a now famous painter, "you would 
never hang a stunner ! " Again, Rossetti, writing to 
Madox Brown in 1861, says : " A few blokes and 
coves are coming at eight or so on Friday evening to 
participate in oysters and obloquy. Will you identify 
yourself with them and their habits ?" 



218 ROSSETTI [chap. 

Eossetti, indeed, on occasions, could behave with an 
unconventiouality which was almost undignified, but 
his personal charm was such that he was able to ex- 
tricate himself from disagreeable situations in which a 
less good-humoured man might have provoked serious 
or unpleasant consequences. His behaviour to those in 
whom he discerned a type of beauty which struck him, 
was unconventional to the verge of ofEensiveness and 
beyond. One of his models made his acquaintance 
first by finding him running out of a confectioner's 
with a half-bitten tart in his hand to stare in her face. 
Another, a simple country girl, felt, as she sat in 
a restaurant, her hair suddenly seized and untied. 
She remonstrated very vehemently. " I wanted to 
see how it looked," was the reply ; and a few 
minutes after, such was his personal fascination, she 
had made an appointment to sit for a picture. He 
would call a cabman off his rank with an opprobrious 
name, and make friends with him on the strength of 
the insult. He was walking on one occasion with Mr. 
and Mrs. William Morris at Upton. They happened 
to pass a village school when the children were sing- 
ing a hymn. On the conclusion of the performance^ 
Rossetti put his head in at the window and shouted 
a stentorian Aynen. The Morrises, as respectable 
householders, fled in haste, and the irate school- 
mistress came out to remonstrate. Yet so potent was 
Rossetti's personal influence, that in ten minutes he was 
holding in the schoolroom an extemporised examina- 
tion in geography, and awarding penny prizes for good 
answers. But his practical humour in early days 
had often something perverse and even unscrupulous 
about it. He made Dean Stanley aghast by defending 



viii.] CHARACTEE 219 

elaborately in his presence the vices of Neronian Rome. 
In all this there was no desire to pose as eccentric. 
Exasperated by any suspicion of sanctimoniousness, he 
was merely following the impulse of the moment to a 
whimsical excess of paradox. 

Such slight reminiscences as these indicate that the 
Brotherhood were above all things unaffected. They 
were far too much concerned with the spirit of the 
thing to waste any time in adopting a pose about it. 
It was so with Eossetti to the end. When he wrote 
or painted, he threw into both the highest enthusiasm, 
and surrounded his conceptions with all the dignity 
conceivable. But he had a great talent for caricature 
and humorous drawing which he freely employed for 
the amusement of his friends, and his talk was plain, 
brisk, sensible, pungent, and vigorous even when he 
was expressing the deepest mysteries of art. What 
could be more absolutely unaffected than the following 
narration of how Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti came 
to the conclusion that a statue of Bacon on which 
Woolner was engaged was too short ? Brown hinted 
this to the sculptor, but " fearing he would not [alter 
it] sufficiently, I proposed to Gabriel that we should go 
together, and insist upon the head being made smaller 
and the body longer. Eossetti said he would come, 
but I must be spokesman, as he funked it. However, 
while I was looking at the statue and thinking how to 
begin, Eossetti, who, by the way, had all along before 
sworn the statue was perfect, blurts out, ' I say, that 
chap's too short, I certainly think.' In this delicate 
way he broke the ice, and we began in earnest." 

Humour indeed was one of Eossetti's strongest 
characteristics — not delicate, fanciful, remote humour, 



220 EOSSETTI [chap. 

but broad, laughable, pungent. In 1850, when he was 
painting the background of Tlie Bower-Meadoio down 
at Sevenoaks with Holman Hunt in rainy weather, 
he gives a very whimsical account of his troubles. 
" Hunt gets on swimmingly — yesterday, indeed, a full 
inch over the ankles : I myself had to sketch under 
the canopy of heaven, without a hat, and with my 
umbrella tied over my head to my buttonhole — a 
position which, will you oblige me by remembering, 
I expressly desired should be selected for my statue. 
... I saw the back of a pair of top boots, and a cut- 
away coat; Lord Amherst, I was told, was sneaking 
inside, but he refrained from exposing either his 
person or his ideas on Art. His house is visited with 
artists in Egyptian swarms, poor wretch ! Hunt re- 
marked — ' How disagreeable to enter one of your 
rooms for the purpose of delivering a soliloquy, and 
find a man there behind an easel ' ; which was bobbish 
for Hunt." 

His talk was still more incisive, and his criticisms 
relentlessly humorous. For instance, he said of Will- 
iam Morris that " Topsy had the greatest capacity for 
producing and annexing dirt of any man he ever met 
with." Of Benjamin Woodward, the architect of the 
Oxford Union, he said that he was " the stillest crea- 
ture that ever breathed out of an oyster-shell." On 
observing on one occasion two camels belonging to a 
menagerie shambling along through the streets, "Look," 
he said, " there's Ruskin and Wordsworth virtuously 
taking a walk." When Burne-Jones first called on 
Rossetti in his studio in Chatham Place, he noted 
that there were no books on the shelves, and Rossetti 
appears gravely to have said that books were no use to 



VIII.] CHARACTER 221 

a painter except to prop up models upon in diflficult 
positions, and that then they might be very useful. 

The impression that remains upon the mind is that 
Eossetti's humour was of rather an unscrupulous kind, 
though on the other hand he was quick to feel remorse 
if he saw that pain was being given by what he said. 
But it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that in 
ordinary life he had no touch of mysterious solemnity 
or of artificial dignity, but rather a strong relish for 
humorous contrasts and witty images. He was fond 
of contagious jests and loud laughter, and heartily 
despised any attempt to view life in ordinary inter- 
course from any but the most natural and robust 
standpoint. 

In early days Rossetti was decidedly indolent, not 
with a lethargic indolence, but with the volatile 
desultoriness of a man with superabundant vitality, 
who had a thousand schemes in his head, and who 
found it difficult to settle down to any one thing. 
His father several times took occasion to remonstrate 
with him very severely on his want of application, 
and the early letters from his friends are full of 
lamentations that he will not set to at any definite 
work or finish what he has undertaken. As he grew 
older this insensibly altered ; he grew absorbed in his 
work, he began to feel the pleasure of making money 
— indeed he spent so lavishly that money-making 
became a prime necessity, and his work was, as a rule, 
commissioned so long beforehand that he was obliged 
to work hard to fulfil his pledges. Moreover, his 
resources in the way of amusement were few ; he had 
no physical recreations to fall back upon, as he dis- 
liked exercise j he read a good deal in an easy way, 



222 KOSSETTI [chap. 

and he was fond of the society of intimate friends. 
Employment of some kind became a necessity to him, 
for to a vivid mind like Rossetti's ennui is the terrible 
foe. The result is that, considering the long periods 
during which his activities were suspended by illness, 
the amount of work he did, in poetry and painting, 
is very remarkable ; but an interesting letter written 
late in life shows that he was conscious of not having 
at all fulfilled his destiny with respect to the work he 
might have done : — 

" Sloth, alas ! has but too much to answer for with 
me ; and is one of the reasons (though I will not say 
the only one), why I have always fallen back on quality 
instead of quantity in the little I have ever done. I 
think often with Coleridge : 

" ' Sloth jaundiced all : and from my graspless hand 
Drop friendship's precious pearls like hour-glass sand. 
I weep, yet stoop not : the faint anguish flows, 
A dreamy pang in morning's feverish doze.' " 

The letter is a manly one, though deeply tinged with 
the melancholy which was characteristic of his later 
years. 

Rossetti's attitude to practical politics was one of 
indifference almost amounting to aversion. He owned 
to taking some interest in the principles underlying 
the turbid surface of events, or rather he resented the 
imputation that he had no interest in such matters; 
but the life of the practical politician, the canvassing, 
the committees, the disagreeable preponderance of 
dust and din over actual results, seemed to him utterly 
/Savavcros and vulgar. He wrote an interesting letter 
on the subject in which he says : — 



VIII. J CHARACTER 223 

" I must admit, at all hazards, that my friends here 
consider me exceptionally averse to politics; and I 
suppose I must be, for I never read a Parliamentary 
debate in my life ! At the same time I will add that, 
among those whose opinions I most value, some think 
me not altogether wrong when I venture to speak 
of the momentary momentousness and eternal futility 
of many noisiest questions. However, you must simply 
view me as a nonentity in any practical relation to 
such matters." 

William Morris gave an interesting explanation of 
what he believed to be Rossetti's attitude of mind 
in these matters : — 

" I can't say," he writes, " how it was that Rossetti 
took no interest in politics ; but so it was : of course 
he was quite Italian in his general turn of thought ; 
though I think he took less interest in Italian politics 
than in English, in spite of his knowing several of 
the leading patriots personally, Saffi for instance. The 
truth is he cared for nothing but individual and 
personal matters ; chiefly of course in relation to art 
and literature, but he would take abundant trouble 
to help any one person who was in distress of mind or 
body ; but the evils of any mass of people he couldn't 
bring his mind to bear upon. I suppose in short it 
needs a person of hopeful mind to take disinterested 
notice of politics, and Eossetti was certainly not 
hopeful." 

A marked characteristic of Eossetti, which grew 
upon him in later life, was his dislike of publicity of 
any kind. His idea was to live his own life and dream 
his own dreams, and the criticism of others merely 
harassed and weakened him. He felt with Keats 



224 ROSSETTI [chap. 

that his own criticism of his own work was far more 
important than the strictures of others ; but he had 
a strong sense of his right to seckision, and he had 
an almost physical sense of the humiliation of being 
discussed, like the character in one of Mr. Henry- 
James's novels who says that the consciousness that 
he is being criticised in his absence by a man whom 
he dislikes, makes him feel as if the footman was 
wearing his hat. 

In all this he was not weak, but self-willed. The 
mystery that grew up about his work was not of 
his own creating; it was rather the result of his 
deliberate purpose to live his life to himself, to see 
the friends he loved, and not to be the prey of 
inquisitive persons. He acted in the spirit of Euskin's 
paradoxical maxim, that an artist should be fit for 
the best society and keep out of it. The relentless 
gossip which pursued him might have given a self- 
conscious man a pleasurable sense of importance, but 
it only grated on Rossetti. For there never was a 
man with less pose of any kind : he knew what his 
aims and desires were, and his only object was to 
realise these as far as possible, and in his free hours to 
choose such company and recreations as he desired. 

It is difficult to say exactly what Rossetti's religious 
views were. The religious element was very strongly 
developed in the family, both in his mother and his 
two sisters; and we may infer that it was probably 
not absent from Rossetti himself, though appearing 
in a different guise. There is no evidence that he 
concerned himself with considerations of Christian 
doctrine, and he would probably have regarded theo- 
logians as people who were engaged in attempting 



viii.] CHAKACTER 225 

to define the Unknowable. He was, no doubt, a 
free-thinker, and held an agnostic position; but at 
the same time he had a strong vein of superstition 
in his nature, and there is a good deal of evidence 
that in his later days his thoughts turned much on 
the personal relation between God and man. He 
desired not only forgiveness, but definite absolution, 
and this at a time when, though death was fast closing 
upon him, his intellectual force seems in no way to 
have lost its grip. I should regard Rossetti as having 
a strong belief in God and the unseen world, though 
without definite conceptions of what lay behind the 
veil, and a considerable impatience of attempts at 
precise definition. 

It has often been questioned whether the develop- 
ment of the artistic nature is necessarily attended by 
the weakening of the moral fibre. It is so only if 
the artist endeavours to create for himself a fantastic 
seclusion, and to exclude from it the wholesome, 
bitter experience of life. To treat continually the 
tragic emotions of life as material for artistic expres- 
sion is almost bound to destroy the balance of a nature, 
because the emotion and the tragedy are viewed, as 
it were, through a glass, in security, as a man may 
gaze on a body in the Morgue, cultivating his sensi- 
bility, without cultivating the human instinct which 
leads a man so far as possible to remedy and alleviate 
calamity. 

Rossetti is generally regarded as a man who tried to 
create an artificial paradise, and to drown the urgent 
voices of the world beneath the cooing of coteries. 
This is an entire misconception. For the first forty 
years of his life he lived robustly, generously, man- 
Q 



226 ROSSETTI [chap. 

fully. He took his share of bright and dark, and, like 
the companions of Ulysses, 

" ever with a frolic welcome took 
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 
Free hearts, free foreheads." 

He was masterful, self-willed, impatient, self-absorbed ; 
but he was also generous of help and of sympathy, 
sociable, brave, enthusiastic, fond of beauty and 
laughter and talk. He, if any man, " warmed both 
hands before the fire of life." 

Yet any one who carefully studies Rossetti's life and 
work must, I think, become gradually conscious of a 
certain growing disappointment as the years go on. 
Perhaps that is too light a word to use for a thought 
that carries with it a shadow of deep melancholy. 
The impression produced by the character and the 
genius of the man at his best is one of incomparable 
richness. Here was one of those rare spirits, full of 
exuberant vitality, who could produce works not only 
of supreme technical excellence, but works, the slightest 
of which betrayed a force, a vigour, a grace of extra- 
ordinary intensity, whether he wrote slowly or rapidly, 
whether he made a sketch, or a design, or a finished 
painting; everything that came from his hand had 
this forcible quality which we call genius, and which, 
whether it attracted or repelled, could not be gainsaid. 
His art has been well called the climax of personality ; 
and moreover it was freely recognised by all who 
knew him best, that his was not a nature which had 
slowly made the best of and matured one species of 
excellence, but that his work was only a faint expres- 
sion of an inner force, and streamed from him like 
light from the sun. Even when broken with illness 



VIII.] CHARACTER 227 

and enslaved by the sad bondage of habit, this person- 
ality still dazzled and almost hypnotised all who were 
brought into contact with him, up to the very end. 

And yet one cannot avoid the thought which is forced 
upon one, that he did not fulfil the possibilities of his 
nature. It is not ungenerous to say this, because one 
may at the same time gratefully admit that the body 
of his work is both large and of supreme excellence. 
But as he crosses the threshold of life he seems to be 
capable de tout. He seems the heir of the ages of art. 
Then, as the years go on, it is clear that the stream is 
contracting, and that it is being forced into smaller 
and smaller channels. It is not that he seems to have 
narrowed his output deliberately, to have recognised 
that to work effectively in a world of specialists it is 
necessary to be a specialist too. One rather feels that 
this oj)ulent nature is becoming the tool of circum- 
stance ; that by deliberately excluding from his life so 
many wholesome human influences, the character, in- 
stead of opening freely like a flower in the free air, is 
growing like an exotic in the corner of a hothouse. 

We would not seem to question or criticise too 
strictly his own power of initiative ; that outer control 
which we name Fate or Providence does seem to have 
set a hedge about his spirit. His tragical marriage, 
his failure of health, his self-willed habits of life, all 
tended to isolate him unduly from the world ; and the 
result is a lack of breadth in his work which prevents 
his taking the position, even in art, to which his native 
greatness seems to have entitled him. He is not 
among those who appeal to all alike; though, apart 
from those who are sealed of his tribe, there are many 
catholic-minded people with strongly balanced minds 



228 ROSSETTI [chap. 

who can recognise without drawbacks the attraction 
of this strange, beauty -haunted dreamer ; still, there 
will always be persons who, with a strong instinct for 
certain kinds of beauty, will be repelled by Eossetti's 
art, and feel a dim sense of uneasiness, even danger, in 
his conception of life ; and we cannot say that this 
instinct is wholly wrong. This is not the moment 
at which to enter into the controversy which must 
always prevail as to whether Art can exist for its own 
sake without any reference to its effect on character. 
Possibly Art which is self-absorbed may thus reach 
its highest development ; but the widest view would 
seem to be that the equable development of the whole 
of man's nature is the purpose which underlies the 
vast fabric of mortal things. If that be so, then, as 
Eossetti believed in his earlier days, there is a sacrifice 
demanded of the artist too, which is the service of man. 
It was in the gnomic poem of Soothsay that Eossetti 
wrote his deliberate creed out. It may thus be sum- 
marised : — to mistrust the certainties of human know- 
ledge, but to believe in Nature ; to be independent 
and subservient to no man, not to nurture false hopes, 
but to be content to have sung truly, and to have 
been loved; to be consistent, to hate flattery, to be 
true to friendship, to be liberal, to be laborious, to 
abhor indolence, not to waste the golden hours; in 
religion to follow faith rather than dogma; to be 
grateful, not to waste strength in vain hope or vain 
regret ; — so runs the symbol, based upon generosity 
and love, and wrought into a proud stoicism by sad 
experience. But though the doctrine is shadowed by 
melancholy, though he who framed it had learned not 
to expect too much from life, yet it is an essentially 



viii.] CHARACTER 229 

manly, courageous, temperate, and true creed. There 
is no touch of morbid sentiment here, no exotic feel- 
ing, no luxurious dalliance with emotion. 

Such then was Eossetti : mystical, full of passion, 
haunted by the sense of beauty, with an intense need 
of loving and being loved ; dominant, fiery, genial, 
robust; with a narrow outlook, and yet with a keen 
intellectual power ; capable, generous, lavish, humor- 
ous, a natural leader of men, self-centred, unbalanced ; 
with no touch of tranquillity about him, but eager, 
ardent, impatient. It is no wonder that even before 
his death, and during a life so strangely shadowed, 
so knit with tragedy, so vital and yet so doomed, he 
had become one of the most romantic figures of the 
time, and that his whole life still retains a mysterious 
attraction, the force of which it is impossible to gainsay 
or resist. 

To most of us the moments of perception of the 
beautiful come rarely, a sudden brightness among grey 
hours, like blossoms springing from a ledge in a rock- 
face; but with Eossetti this perception appears to 
have been, at least in the good years of health and 
vigour, more or less continuous. Beauty was the 
atmosphere in which he lived, and to which the sordid 
acts of real life were but dreary interruptions. 

But from the river of delight he drank too greedily. 
As the king in Tlie Sick King in Bokhara says — 

" Thou wast a sinner, thou poor man ! 
Thou wast athirst ; and didst not see, 
That, though we take what we desire, 
"We must not snatch it eagerly." 

It is notable that, in Millais' picture of Lorenzo and 
Isabella, the portrait of Eossetti is traceable in the 



230 ROSSETTI [chap, viii, 

guest who, at the end of the long row, swallows with 
a curious zest and intentness of gesture the wine from 
his long glass — the very gesture is said to have been 
characteristic. 

But, from the beginning of the world, this persistent 
care for outward beauty has brought with it weariness 
and satiety of spirit. And thus it was with Rossetti 
that his life turned to sadness. As Keats wrote of 
Melancholy, 

" She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die; 
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips 
Bidding adieu ; and aching Pleasure nigh, 

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: 
Ay, in the very ten)ple of Delight 

Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, 

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue 
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine ; 
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, 
And be among her cloudy trophies hung." 

And so it comes to pass that the grave of Rossetti is 
as the tomb of Polydorus on the Thracian strand : he 
lay buried in a forest of spears ; the very hafts of the 
sharp lances that had slain him had taken root, and 
had thrown out leaf and flower above the lonely 
mound; so that ^neas, when he would fain have 
torn a bough to deck the altars, saw the blood trickle 
from the broken branch, and heard in speechless 
horror the groans of the sad spirit rise thin upon the 
air. "Jam puree sepulto," cried the prisoned ghost. 
Then in love and pity the Trojan band performed the 
sacred rites, laid the sorrowing spirit to rest, and 
sought another shore. 



INDEX 



Academy, The, 55, 
Academy, The Royal, 179. 
Allingham, William, 163, 164, 165, 

166, 167, 173, 174, 217. 
Ancieut Mariner, The (Coleridge) , 

115. 141- 

Antwerp and Bruges, 29. 

Arnold, Matthew, 139. 

Art of England, The (Ruskin), 
183. 

Astarte Syriaca (picture), 84, 186, 
192. 

Athenczum, The, 24, 62, 69, 79, 
162, 184. 

Aurea Catena (picture), 186, 192. 

Aurora Leigh (Elizabeth B. Brown- 
ing), 167. 

Ave, 12, 95, 98, 125-6. 

Ay twin (Watts-Dunton), 61,73,74. 

B 

Ballads and Sontiets, 66. 
Beata Beatrix (picture), 186, 193-4. 
Before the Battle (picture), 185. 
Belcolore (picture), 186, 191. 
Belloc, Madame, 44. 
Beryl-Songs, The, 106. 
Birth-bo7td, The, 131. 
Blake, 19, 77, 160, 161. 
Blake, Life (^/(Gilchrist) , 153, 160-2. 
Blessed Damozel, The, 12, 28, 97, 
1 13-17, 120. 



Bhie Closet, The (picture), 185, 
Bocca Baciata (picture), 186, 191. 
Boccaccio, 77. 
Bonifazio's Mistress (picture), 84, 

159, 181, 185. 
Borgia (picture), 181, 189. 
Bower Meadow, The (picture), 182. 
Boyd, Miss Alice, 54. 
Bride's Prelude, The, 13, 25, 66, 

82, loi, 108-10. 
Brown, Ford Madox, 11, 13, 14, 

22, 30, 31, 42, 49, 50, 58, 81, 167, 

177, 204, 206, 209, 213, 214, 217, 

219. 
Brown, Oliver Madox, 76, 173. 
Browning, Robert, 12. 13, 64, 77, 

97. 13s. 139. 167, 174, 186, 196. 
Buchanan, Robert, 61, 62, 63, 91, 

93, 162. 
Burden of Nineveh, The, 26, 89, 

126-7. 
Burne-Jones, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 

80, 205, 220. 
Buy from us with a golden curl 

(picture), 195. 
Byron, 139, 140. 



Caine, Mr. Hall, 9, 58, 63, 66-70, 
72, 81, 107, 165, 168, 170, 171, 
172 ; Kecollectio7is of, 66, 163. 

Callcott, 178. 



231 



282 



ROSSETTI 



Carillon, The, 29. 

Carlyle, 166. 

Carroll, Lewis, 64, 

Gary, F. S., 10. 

Cassandra (picture), 180, 186. 

Cavalcanti, Guido, 147, 148, 149. 

Ghatterton, 76, 170, 173, 174. 

Chaucer, 73. 

Chesneau, M., 179. 

Christabel (Coleridge), 141. 

Christmas Carol, The (picture), 

185. 
dough, Arthur, 139. 
Coleridge, 76, 97, 139, 141, 169, 172, 

222. 
Coleridge (Cottle) , -jj. 
Collinson, James, 22. 
Commedia Divina (Dante), 147. 
Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 169. 
Cornelius (painter), 18. 
Correggio, 160. 
Cowper, 165. 
Crashaw, 98. 



D 

Dante, 7, 8, 12, 77, 147, 151, 152. 
Dante at Verona, 13, 25, 82, 

121-2. 
Dante drawing the Angel (picture) , 

180. 
Dante's Dream (picture), 180, 188- 

9- 

Day and Night Songs (W. Ailing- 
ham), 194. 

Day-Dream, The (picture) , 186. 

Delaroche, 183. 

Deverell, W. H., 44, 45. 

Dickens, "jj. 

Dixon, Canon, in. 

" Dizzy" (dog), 165, 168. 

Dobell, Sydney, 82, 170. 

Donne, 77. 

Dumas, 77. 

Dyce, 179. 



E 

Early Italian Poets, 8, 48, 195. 
Ecce Ancilla Domini (picture) , 24, 

185, 187. 
Eden Bower, 93, loi, 112. 
Enzo, King, 150. 
Even So, 81. 
Eve of St. Agnes, The (Holman 

Hunt's picture), 14. 
Eve of St. Agnes, The (Keats), 99. 
Eve of St, Mark, The (Keats) , 99. 



Fazio's Mistress, see Bonifazio, 
Fiammetta (picture), 186, 191. 
Fifine at the Fair (Browning), 64. 
Flandrin (painter), 177. 
Fleshly School of Poetry, The 

(Buchanan), 61, 94, 162-3. 
Fortnightly Review, The, 56. 
Found (picture), 25, 117, 185, 187, 

190-1, 204. 
Fra Pace (picture), 187-8. 
From the Cliffs, 29. 
Fuseli, 178. 

G 

Gainsborough, 178. 

Gate of Memory, The (picture) , 186. 

Germ, The, 27-30, 116, 158. 

Gesta Romanorum, ill. 

Gilchrist, Alexander, 153, 160. 

Giotto, 20. 

Girlhood of Mary Virgin, T/te 

(picture), 15, 23, 185. 
Goblin Market (Christina Rossettj) , 

194. 
Gosse, Mr., 41, 107, 169, 208. 

H 

Hamlet and Ophelia (picture), 181, 

185, 189-90. 
Hand and Soul, 28, 30, 153-8. 
Haydon, 178. 



INDEX 



233 



Hiawatha (Longfellow), 173. 

Hill, Dr. Birkbeck, 163, 217. 

tiill Summit, The, 88. 

Hireling Shepherd, The (Holman 
Hunt's picture), 25. 

Hist! said Kate the Queen (pic- 
ture), 180. 

Hogarth, 19, 182, 183. 

Houghton, Lord, 19. 

House of Life, The, 66, 79, 84, 85, 

129-37. 176- 
How shall I your true love know ? 

88. 
How they met Themselves (picture) , 

47. 185. 
Hughes, Arthur, 42, 215. 
Hunt, Mr. Holman, 12, 14, 15, 21, 

22, 23, 24, 30, 45, 178, 187, 196, 

217, 220. 
Hunt, Leigh, 15. 
Hunting of the Snark, The (Lewis 

Carroll), 64. 



Ingres (painter), 177, 186. 
Insomnia, 128. 



James, Mr. Henry, 224. 
Jan Van Hunks, 72. 
Jemiy, 13, 25, 26, iiy-21, 
Johnson, Dr., 168, 169. 
Johnson (Boswell), 68, yj. 
Johnson at the Mitre, Dr. (picture) , 
184, 185, 190. 



K 

Keats, 12, 73, 76, 80, 85, 99, 13s, 
139, 141, 170, 171, 172, 176, 223, 
230. 

Keats, Life and Letters of (Lord 
Houghton), 19. 



Keith of Ravelston (Sydney Dobell) , 

170. 
Kelmscott, 41, 59, 60, 64, 96. 
King Arthur's Tomb (picture), 185. 
King's Quhair, The (James L), 

108. 
King's Tragedy, The, 66, 74, loi, 

107-8. 



La Bella Mano (picture) , 192. 

La Belle Dame Sans Merci (Keats) , 

170, 171. 
Laboratory, The (picture), 185. 
Lady of Shalott, The (Tennyson), 

98, 194. 
Lady with the Fan, The (picture), 

192. 
Landseer, 179. 
La Pia (picture), 186. 
Last Confession, A, 13, 26, 97, 

123-4. 
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 178. 
Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman), 

173- 

Lee, Frederic (painter) , 178. 

Leonardo da Vinci, 16, 20. 

Leslie, 19. 

Letters and Memoirs (W. M. Ros- 
setti), 163. 

Letters, Rossetti's, 163 seq. 

Lilith (picture), 186, 192. 

Livy, 142. 

Longfellow, 173. 

Lorenzo and Isabella (Millais' pic- 
ture), 229. 

Lost Days, 133. 

Love Enthroned, 130. 

Love- Lily, 129. 

Love's Nocturn, 90, 91. 

Love-Sweetness, 131. 

Loving Cup, The (picture), 186, 
191. 

Lucrezia Borgia (picture) , 185. 



234 



ROSSETTI 



Lyell, Sir Charles, 3. 
Lyell, Mr. Charles, 3. 
Lytton, Lord, 143. 



M 

McCracken, Mr. (art patron), 31, 

165, 182. 
Mackail, Mr., 39, 203. 
Madness of Ophelia, The (picture) , 

185. 
Marochetti (sculptor), 180. 
Marston, Philip Bourke, 41, 207. 
Mary Magdalefie at the Door of 

Simon (picture), 180. 
Mary's Girlhood, 137, 138. 
Match with the Moon, A, 89, 
Maurice, F. D., 35. 
Mazzini, 7. 

Meinhold, Wilhelm, 174. 
Memling, 177. 

Men and IVornen (Browning) , 37. 
Alerciless Lady, The (picture), 181, 

185, 189. 
Meredith, Mr. George, 51. 
Millais, John Everett, 14, 15, 16, 20, 

22, 23, 24, 45, 159, 180, 187, 229. 
Milton, 62, 77, 135, 168. 
More, Hannah, 168. 
Morland, 178. 
Morris, William, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 

41. 55. 75. 76, 82, 176, 196, 205, 

206, 210, 218, 220, 223. 
Morris, William, Life of {M.a.cka.i\), 

39- 

Morte d' Arthur (Malory), 39. 

Ivlulready, 19. 

Murray, Mr. Fairfax, 41, 91. 

Myers, Frederic, 197. 

My Sister's Sleep, 28, 94. 



N 
Nasmyth, 178. 
Nibelungenlied, 12. 
Nineteenth Century, 80. 



On the Field of Waterloo, 87. 
One Hope, The, 88. 
Ophelia (Millais' picture), 25. 
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 41. 
Overbeck, 18. 
Oxford, 36, 37, 39. 
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 
III, 116, 126. 



Paganini, 7. 

Painting, English school of, 19, 20, 
178-80; French, 177, 178; Ital- 
ian, 177; Belgian, 177; Dutch, 
177. 

Palace of Art, The (picture), 194. 

Pandora, 138; (picture), 186, 193. 

Panizzi, 7. 

Paolo and Francesca (picture) , 181, 
185. 

Pater, Walter, 41, 82, 107, 142, 

151- 

Patmore, Coventry, 25, 28, 81, 143. 

Paton, Noel, 179. 

Pauline (Browning), 13. 

Poe, E. A., 77. 

Poetry of nineteenth century, 78, 

139 seq. 
Polidori, Gaetano, 4, 8, 175. 

Frances Mary Lavinia, 4. 

Portrait, The, 84, 91, 95, 98, 124-5. 
Prceterita (Ruskin), 35, 202. 
Pre-Raphaelites, The, 18 seq., 99, 

178, 179, 217, 219. 
Prince's Progress, The (Christina 

Rossetti), 194. 
Proserpine (picture), 186, 193. 
Punch, 216. 



Raeburn, 178. 

Recollections of Rossetti (Hall 
Caine), 66, 163. 



INDEX 



235 



Rcgina Ccrdium (picture), i86. 

Rembrandt, i6o. 

Retro me, Sathana! 88. 

Return of Tibullus, The (picture), 

193- 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 20, 160, 178. 

Romney, 178. 

Rose Mary, 66, 74, 91, 92, 93, loi, 
102, 104-7. 

Rossetti, Gabriel Charles Dante : 
birth and family history, 3 ; liter- 
ary tastes as a boy, 7, 8 ; first 
efforts at writing, 8 ; school, 9 ; 
disposition as a boy, 9, 10, 12; 
enters drawing academy, 10 ; 
great intellectual activity as a 
youth, 12, 13; translates Dante's 
Vita Nuova, 12 ; writes The 
Blessed Damozel, Ave, Dante at 
Verona, The Bride's Prelude, A 
Last Confession, Jenny, 12, 13 ; 
pupil of Madox Brown, 14; 
friendship with Holman Hunt 
and Millais, 14, 16; shares studio 
with Holman Hunt, 15 ; first im- 
portant picture, 15,23; hesitates 
between painting and literature, 
15, 80, 81 ; effect of early sur- 
roundings on his work, 16; a 
founder of the Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood, 18 seq.; wide ac- 
quaintance with poetical litera- 
ture generally, 22; methods of 
work as a painter, 23 ; exhibits 
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin 
and Ecce Ancilla Domini, 24; 
attacked by the Times and Athe- 
ncBum, 24; defended by Rus- 
kin, 25 ; designs his great picture 
Found, 25 ; turns again to poetry, 
25 ; Sister Helen and other poems, 
25-6; desultory habits, 26 ; aban- 
dons poetry temporarily, 26 ; pub- 
lication of the Germ, orj ; hard 
times, 31 ; friendship with Rus- 
kin,3i; Ruskin's generosity, 31 ; 
Ruskin's letters to him, 32-3; 



helps Maurice at the Working 
Men's College, 35 ; visits Oxford, 
36; relations with Burne-Jones 
and William Morris, 36 seq.; 
friendship with younger men of 
promise, 41 ; partnership with 
William Morris, 41 ; strained re- 
lations, 42, 43 ; falls in love, 45; 
marriage, 47; publishes Early 
Italian Poets, 48; mode of life, 
48, 52, 60; death of his wife, 
49; buries MS. of unpublished 
poems with her, 50; moves 
to Tudor House, Chelsea, 51 ; 
narrow views of art and litera- 
ture, 51 ; artistic and financial 
success, 53 ; goes abroad, 53 ; 
physical trouble, 53; income, 
53, 203 ; recovery of poems 
from his wife's grave, 55 ; their 
publication and triumphant re- 
ception, 55, 56; use of chloral, 
57, 64, 66, 69; lives at Kelms- 
cott with William Morris, 59; 
friendship with Mr. Watts-Dun- 
ton, 61 ; attacked by Buchanan 
in the Contemporary Review, 61 ; 
mind becomes unhinged, 64; 
delusions, 64-5 ; illness, 64, 65 ; 
friendship with Mr. Hall Caine, 
66 ; new edition of the Poems, 
66 ; Ballads and Sonnets, 66 ; 
wanderings in search of health, 
64, 65, 71 ; returns to Cheyne 
Walk, 71 ; increasing illness and 
depression, 71 ; death at Birching- 
ton, 72; method of composition, 
74 ; a great reader, 75 ; favourite 
authors, 76-7 ; characteristics of 
his poetry, 78 J^;^./ his message, 
79-80; theory of writing, 81; 
sense of beauty, 83 ; two distinct 
manners, 83; melancholy of his 
poems, 84 ; use of words, 84 ; 
sonnets, 29, 85-9, 129-38 ; lyrics, 
86, 87, 127-9 ; humour and 
fantasy, 89 ; music of his verse, 



236 



ROSSETTI 



90; use of the supernatural, 
90; artistic restraint, 89, 90, 96, 
97 ; intensity, 92 ; rhymes, 93, 
94; parody of his style by 
Buchanan, 94; simplicity of his 
early poems, 94-5; essentially an 
indoors poet, 95 ; influence of 
other poets on him, 97; develop- 
ment of and alterations in his 
poems, 29-30, 91, 102, 115-16; 
influence on English poetry, 142- 
4; position in relation to the 
literature of the century, 139 
seq.; translations, 145 seq.; 
soundness of his criticism, 148, 
161, 162, 169-75; ^''s Italian 
models, 146 seq. ; prose writings, 
152, 162; gift for letter-writing, 
163 seq.; voluptuousness of his 
poetry, 62, 63, 135, 136; his 
painting, 176 seq.; Ruskin's 
estimate of him, 176, 177; chief 
artistic influences, 177 seq. ; 
Madox Brown's great influence 
on him, 177-80 ; technical limita- 
tions, 180, 181, 187; origmator 
of a new type of female beauty, 
181; primarily a colourist, 182; 
his colour preferences, 182; 
water-colours, 182-4 ; methods 
and mannerisms, 184-5, ^99 1 
models, 185 ; various classes of 
pictures, 185-6; mediaeval, 186; 
Dante series, 188-90; dramatic, 
189-90; genre pictures, 190-1; 
half-length female figures, 191-4; 
book illustrations, 194-5 I nature 
and aim of his art, 195 seq. ; 
character and description, 202 
seq. ; lack of sympathy, 35 ; in- 
tellectual dominance, 34, 36, 37, 
39, 40, 195-6, 203, 204, 206, 226 ; 
eloquence, 40, 70; charm of 
manner, 40, 206, 218; collector 
of bric-a-brac and queer ani- 
mals, 52 ; his moral side, 56 ; an 
Italian by instinct, 62, 78, 202; 



beauty of his voice, 67, 70; re- 
ligious views, 71, 224-5; portraits 
of him, 73, 229; personal ap- 
pearance and characteristics, 11, 
67, 72, 73, 208 ; passion for 
beauty, 202; susceptibility to 
feminine charm, 202; devotion 
to his mother, 168, 211-12; 
generous appreciation of the 
work of others, 208-10; great- 
ness as a man, 203 ; acuteness 
and penetration, 203 ; keenness 
in money matters, 204, 215 ; 
friendships, 206-7 ; generosity, 
215; naturalness, 216, 219, 224; 
fondness for slang, 217 ; uncon- 
ventionality, 218 ; humour, 219- 
21; dislike of publicity 223; 
many good qualities, 205, 213, 
215, 225; faults, 204, 205, 210; 
philosophic creed, 130, 228 ; sum- 
ming up, 229-30. 

Rossetti, Gabriele (father), 3, 4, 5, 
7, 8, 9, 10, 26, 212. 

Mrs., nee Polidori (mother), 

3, 4, 5, 6, 26, 72, 74, 168, 186, 
211-13. 

Nicola (grandfather), 4. 

Maria Francesca (sister), 6. 

William Michael (brother) , 6, 

13, 22, 23, 27, 42, 51, 91, 108, 
163, 207, 212, 215. 

Christina (sister), 6, 28, 72, 

74, 88, 135, 142, 143, 186, 194. 

Mrs., nee Siddal (wife), 25, 

34. 44-51. 215- 
Rubens, 160. 
Ruskin, 16, 25, 31-5, 36, 46, 47, 48, 

126, 176, 179, 180, 183, 202, 205, 

206, 220, 224. 



Saint Agnes of Intercession, 9, 17, 

153. 158-6Q. 



INDEX 



237 



Salutation of Beatrice, The (pic- 
ture), i8o. 
Scott, Sir Walter, 139, 140. 

W. Bell, 35, 46, 54, 166. 

Sea-Spell, The (picture), 192. 
Shakespeare, 62, 76, 135, 170. 
Sharp, Mr. William, 117. 
Shelley, 12, 76, 139, 140, 171, 172. 
Shelley (Hogg), 77. 
Sick King in Bokhara, The, 229. 
Siddal, Miss. See Rossetti, Mrs. 
Sidonia the Sorceress (Meinhold), 

174. 
Sigurd the Volsung (William 

Morris), 75. 
Sir Galahad (picture), 185. 
Sir Hugh the Heron, 8. 
Sir Lancelot's Vision 0/ the San- 
grail (fresco), 36. 
Sir Tristram and La Belle Yseult 

(picture), 184. 
Sister Helen, 92, 97, 101-4. 
Sleepless Dreams, 87. 
Smetham, James, 186. 
Soothsay, 228. 
Sorrentino, 12. 
Soul's Beauty, 131. 
Sphinx, The (picture), 186. 
Spring, 137, 138. 
Staf and Scrip, The, 86, 92, loi, 

110-12. 
Stanfield (painter), 178. 
Stanley, Dean, 218. 
Stealthy School of Criticism, The, 

62. 
Stephens, F. G. (art critic), 22. 
Stevenson, R. L., 142. 
Stratton Water, 98, loi, 113. 
Stream's Secret, The, 54, 80, 127-8. 
Superscription, A, 87. 
Swedenborg, 77. 
Swinburne, 41, 46, 51, 56, 142, 143, 

186, 205. 



Tennyson, 12, 75, 96, 124, 139, 140, 
142, 143, 176, 



Tennyson-Turner, 77. 

Times, The, 24, 209. 
Titian, 160, 182. 
Tommaseo, Niccolo, 150. 

Toussaint L Ouverture (Words- 
worth), 175. 

Troy Town, loi, 112. 
Tupper, J. L., 28, 29. 
Turner, 32, 178. 

U 

Union, The Oxford, Frescoes of, 
36, 37- 



Van Eyck, 177. 
Venetian Pastoral, A, 29, 137. 
Venus Verticordia, 138, 192. 
Veronica Veronese (picture), 186, 

192. 
Vita Nuova, translation of Dante's, 

12, 14s, 147, 151-2. 



W 

Ward's English Poets, 82. 

Washing Hands (picture), 185. 

Water PfV/Zyw (picture), 59. 

Watts-Dunton, Mr., 61, 69, 72, 76, 
80, 106, 180, 181. 

Wedding of St. George, T/ie (pic- 
ture), 186. 

West, Benjamin, 178. 

Whistler, 178. 

White Ship, The, 66, 70, loi, 107, 
108. 

Whitman, Walt, 173. 

Wilkie, 19, 183. 

Willow-wood, 162. 

Winter, 137, 138. 

Without Her, 132-3. 

Woods of Westermain, The, 200. 

Woodward, Benjamin (architect), 
36, 220. 

Woolner (sculptor) , 22, 28, 166, 219. 



238 



ROSSETTI 



Wordsworth, 'j'j, 139, 140, 174, 175, 

197, 220. 
Working Men's College, Ormond 

Street, 35, 49. 



World is too much with us, The 

(Wordsworth), 175. 
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) , 

174. 



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